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Summary of the Study Guide for Transformative Counselling Encounters (PYC3705)
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PYC3705 – TRANSFORMATIVE COUNSELLINGENCOUNTERS
STUDY UNIT 1 – BEGINNINGS: CREATING CONTEXT
Critical Questions:
What is the place of ‘experience’ and ‘experiential learning’ in a distance learning
environment?
How do people come into new spaces and how do they value what is coming to meet
them?
These questions provide the basis for study unit 1, which is aimed at helping you to engage
reflexively with the module and to consider how your motivations, personal life
circumstances, social environment and physical landscape can be potentially enabling or
disabling
Key Concepts:
By the time you deal with study unit 4, you should have some basic understanding of the
concepts:
o Context
o Complexity
o Co-creation
o Experiential learning
o Open distance learning
o Relatedness
o Interconnection
o Multiple realities
o Reflexivity
o Metaphor
Finding Your Personal Space Within the Module:
What makes a first encounter memorable is its unique blending of personal experiences
that has the potential to enrich your life and open new senses of knowing and being in
relationships not previously available to you
Lessons From the Dialogue and Case Study:
Pages 3-5
Our own version of reality is but just one
Anderson, Goolishian and Hoffman declare that as we encounter and explore newness, we
are free to create a new perception of reality that allows us to experiment with alternative
meanings of that new experience
o That is why occupying the unfamiliar generates feelings of loss of certainty and
predictability, and the normal flow of life as we know it is disrupted
Motsemme and Pillay – the certainty of our ideas and the patterns that we have acquired
from our histories determine to a large extent our perceptions of what constitutes normative
standers for behaving and dealing with what comes to meet us
In the moments of change we are presented with an opportunity to negotiate new meanings
and to find new words that represent this changing reality
Learning to facilitate and engage meaningfully in counselling relationships is an activity that
requires active involvement or exposure to events or people over a period of time
,How We Engage With You in the Module:
Metaphors and stories as tools of communication
o Use the idea of experience as an ‘umbrella concept’ to refer to needs, behaviours,
emotions and values
Enhancing self-awareness through reflexivity
o Self-awareness and the ability to reflexively look at your own experiences and how
they influence your ideas and actions become essential ingredients of your learning
process
o The forces of habit, tradition, and expectations play a role in shaping our
experiences
These forces are sometimes difficult to overcome
o Being aware of how we affect and are influenced by interaction with others
We note that experience and living that experience may sometimes be a
matter of getting caught up in a flow, of enacting sensibilities that are deeply
inscribed in one’s embodied habits of acting
We acknowledge that an awareness of how affect and are in turn influenced
by our interactions with others has the potential to increase the quality of our
encounters with other people and to enhance future practice
The notion of reflexivity (Hertz) implies a shift in people’s ways of knowing and
being in the world
When people engage with and encounter others, they bring parts of
themselves into the context of relating and create new realities and ways of
being that are peculiar to that interactional space
In relating to others, an atmosphere of empathy is created in which we learn
to feel with another
This sense of feeling with another opens up the possibility for bonds to
be built up and allows us to move beyond the first impressions created
by external factors
Implies a deep sense of presence, which expresses the value of our
humanness
Aspects of How We Invest in New Encounters:
We realise we are active participants within networks of connections with others and that
these connections happen across time and locality
Harding – affirms that we should be aware of how our interests filter into how we engage
with others implying that we should take serious how we are located within constellations of
gender, race, class, and citizenships
Ability to Imagine Alternatives:
Reflexivity makes it possible for people to question the meaningfulness of their life
experience, to review the values they hold, and to search for new and more satisfactory
forms
The ability to imagine alternatives, future courses of action and our self-awareness of
people’s agency, that is, that a person can initiate action, mean that people have to confront
the issue of choice
STUDY UNIT 2 – SURVEYING CONTEXTS FOR COUNSELLING
Critical Questions:
How would a module on counselling designed in SA be responsive to local, national and
continental contextual issues?
How do we understand what is happening in our society, and in particular, the relationship
between societal issues, the changes in these issues, and people’s daily lives?
, Key Concepts:
Refer to additional resources
The ‘cracked’ social landscape:
A crack – a symbol of the perils of knowing (or lack thereof) and a threat to establishing
meaningful relationships between people
Also expresses moments of crisis in the lives of people
As we begin to see ourselves as a society reflected by moments of crisis, we get
confirmation, perhaps, of our worst fears about how fragmented and chaotic our society
really is
Provides an evocative display of how people continuously struggle to give meaning to life
within the margins of our fragmented society
The fragmentation in relationships caused by HIV:
Page 19
No Simple Answers to Life’s Contradictions:
Page 19
2004 HIV Infections Statistics:
Page 20
Encounters With Individual Suffering and Collective Pain:
We draw connections with how people struggle to maintain or gain mental health within
contexts that are often deprived and are conflicted in various ways
In taking up the responsibility to open up the cracked social landscape in which people’s
lives are continuously shaped and find meaning, we are urged to consider alternative ways
of living and being and meaning-making in contexts of relationships
Contending With Diversity:
Behaviour that is acceptable in 1 culture may not be acceptable in another, but behaviour
says nothing about the intrinsic worth of people
Behaviour is simply a manifestation of the underlying values the person has learn from their
own culture
Social Upheaval and Multilayers of Human Experience:
Alongside the loss of life, the fragmentation of families, the displacement of populations,
and the disruption of social and economic institutions exists a range of trauma
Social and Physical Dislocation:
Page 25
Tough Questions for Understanding Hard-Hitting Problems:
Activity 2.4 – page 26
Asking Questions That Lead to Transformation:
Tough problems are characterised by 3 types of complexity
o Dynamic complexity
Means that cause and effect are distant in space and time
To address this type, you need a systemic approach to the problem and the
solution
o Social complexity
Means that there are many different and usually conflicting points of view and
assumptions about the issue, and the problem isn’t owned by a single entity
This demands a participative approach
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