Counsellor education as practice: An Australian narrative reflection on teaching and learning the practice of counselling in a university setting

Abstract

This paper explores a lecturer's personal and professional reflections on teaching and learning in counselling. The paper utilises a narrative approach that allows the reader an autoethnographic 'peek' into the social and learning contexts of teaching counselling in a foundations counselling program during an intensive skills-based residential school held on campus. Students come from all over Australia to undertake these studies. The dynamic interpersonal experience of the residential teaching and interaction with students forms the basis for considering teacher or faculty transformative awareness, and how this awareness feeds back to students, and to the profession, by the demonstration of an adult educationist and mutual learning philosophy as essential to counsellor training.