Counseling and Coaching in Times of Crisis and Transition

From Research to Practice

Laura Nota, Salvatore Soresi, Laura Nota, Salvatore Soresi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351970563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Counseling and Coaching in Times of Crisis and Transition explores how threats and challenges caused by rapid social and technological changes require counselors and coaches to rethink their usual ways of working, and, in some cases, even abandon their traditional theoretical anchors. The authors of this forward-thinking book argue that practitioners who aim to help others strengthen their resources can no longer afford to wait for clients in their offices or offer them protected, objective and neutral professional relationships.

Contributors from around the world argue that there is a real need for new counseling and coaching actions to be delivered in different contexts: counselors and coaches should be able to use heterogeneous languages and interventions, as well as numerous relationship modalities and activities in order to streamline the support that they offer to people in sectors as diverse as health and well-being, life and career design, prevention and community inclusion, work inclusion, and schools. The book provides an evidence-based framework, with numerous counseling and coaching examples that are capable of promoting people's strengths, whether this be face-to-face, in groups, or online.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of counseling and coaching, as well as those with an interest in psychological, social and educational science. It should also be essential reading for practitioners and policymakers in a diverse range of contexts, including those working on intervention and support for vulnerable people, non-traditional and disadvantaged students, and people with disabilities.

Part I

Approaches, methodologies and techniques for counseling and coaching

Looking back, we can certainly say that the times we are living in are very different from the past and are also especially challenging. The Western world is now looking with concern at the high levels of discomfort and malaise being experienced because of social, economic, and environmental crises that are more frequent and intense than those of the past century.

In addition, our life contexts contain such highly complex elements that they are not so easily understandable with our current instruments of analysis, which continue to hypothesize the existence of prevalently linear causal relationships among events. Thanks to the contributions of the theories of complexity, we are realizing that reality is mostly made up of systems characterized by a great number of elements affecting one another via micro influences, which can trigger causal relationships that are not easily predictable. In all of this, a significant role is attributed to the new technologies that are characterizing educational settings, professional contexts, and leisure actions.

Many people are, therefore, looking for advantageous ways to cope with our current times and with the most widespread forms of difficulties and discomfort. Counseling and coaching can be helpful modalities to assist people in this task if they can free themselves from their “old consolidated operational ways” to promote opportunities for growth and improvement in increasingly heterogeneous contexts. This will have to done by using new conceptual and operational instruments derived from our ability to theorize the best from different knowledge domains, from research areas and different applicative sectors traditionally competing with one another.

In the following pages, we present approaches, methodologies and techniques which, albeit their diversity, have responded in a heterogeneous and flexible way to current needs and priorities.

In Chapter 1 of the first section, much space is devoted to an ability considered particularly important in our times: reflexivity. Giovanna Esposito and Maria Francesca Freda present the Narrative Mediation Path, which, by promoting reflection and reflexivity, originates a process that helps to build new meanings and orient actions in a different way. The examples that they propose underscore how a multimodal narrative approach that integrates different narrative modes, as well as the individual and the group process of meaning reconstruction, becomes an innovative approach able to help students who may need to develop reflexive competences to impact their academic performance.

In Chapter 2, Maria Grazia Strepparava, Marco Bani, and Giorgio Rezzonico focus on cognitive and behavioral approaches to counseling, paying attention to some skills about thought reformulation, emotion regulation, and mindfulness that can be useful for healthcare professionals and for those who work in a healthcare environment. Particular emphasis is given to train health practitioners and students in counseling skills to help them to communicate adequately with patients and relatives and to provide a set of basic tools of self-regulation and self-care to treat properly different emotionally challenging situations and to adapt to the professional requirements of the caring professions.

The next author, Moshe Israelashvili, offers a further example of originality in Chapter 3. Starting from the observation that children and adolescents are intensively engaged in dealing with these new technologies and that a prominent feature of engagement in these new technologies is visual, he underlines that this has major implications for the future of (school) counseling. So he briefly reviews the well-documented features of visualized communication and describes two studies that explore the implementation of visualization in a school-related setting, the first on the feasibility of using YouTube in mental health counseling, and the second on the integration of pictures in counseling parents of high-school graduates.

The section closes with a contribution in Chapter 4 by Tim Theeboom, Annelies E.M. van Vianen, Bianca Beersma, Robert Zwitser, and Vladimer Kobayashi who focus on the practitioner’s perspective to better understand the process of coaching. Starting from the acknowledgement of the increased popularity of coaching, together with the relatively costly individualized nature of coaching, they underline the importance of considering the coaching success indicators that coaches refer to. The awareness and the consideration of such indicators can provide information that may be used to increase the alignment between coaching practice and research and therefore help researchers and professionals choose objectives and practices that value effectiveness to be better able to respond to the real needs of individuals.

Chapter 1

Counseling and reflexive processes

Role of multimodal narrative devices in promoting reflection and reflexivity in a university context

Giovanna Esposito and Maria Francesca Freda

Introduction

According to the recent European guidelines (Council of the European Union, 2013), underachievement among university students is a phenomenon currently hampering the processes of inclusion and participation of many European students in universities. As this is a growing issue, with 35% of European students at a risk of dropping out due to their academic performance, there is an increased need for developing novel intervention models that can help deal with underachievement in higher education (HE).

Underachievement is commonly seen as a discrepancy between the level of students’ performance and their academic potential. Accordingly, underachieving students are those who often present with low academic performance by not passing any examinations over a long period of time, achieving low scores in examinations, or presenting with a low Grade Point Average (GPA) or a low European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) score (a standard for comparing study attainment and performance of students in HE throughout the European Union). Such discrepancies may not be the direct result of a diagnosed learning disability and may persist over an extended period of time (Reis & McCoach, 2000). There is not a single cause of underachievement; rather, it is influenced by numerous factors such as teaching methods, personality traits, and impairments in relational or reflexive competences (e.g., Rimm, 2003). Underachieving students are often nontraditional students or disadvantaged students; for example, they may be first-generation students, working students, or immigrants.

The European Commission has called for the need to develop and implement innovative approaches, such as guidance and counseling, to help underachieving university students fully reap the benefits of tertiary education. To respond to these needs, we implemented the Innovative Solution to Acquire Learning to Learn (INSTALL; please see Note) European Project, which involved 198 underachieving students enrolled in four European university degree programs (Italy, Romania, Spain, and Ireland). For this project, a model of narrative group counseling, the Narrative Mediation Path (NMP), was created. It aims at the overall improvement in students’ reflexive processes to influence their academic performance, which is considered to be the main indicator of academic inclusion (e.g., Muskens, 2011).

The relevance of reflexivity in the field of HE is not new in the literature, and reflexivity is deemed useful for encouraging critical thinking and supporting student academic productivity (Taylor, 2011). In particular, underachieving students often face reflexive difficulties with regard to specific developmental tasks (e.g., failing an exam) and strategic utilization of their time at university (Padykula & Horwitz, 2011). Moreover, narration is nowadays considered an important device for developing reflexive competencies among underachieving students. This is because narrative devices play a key role in facilitating the reassignment of meaning to the events of one’s own life (Lieblich, 2012).

In this chapter, we present the theoretical background of NMP counseling by discussing a semiotic and psychodynamic conceptualization of reflexive processes that distinguish between two levels of different complexity (reflection and reflexivity) and that ascribe to multimodal narrative devices a key role in promoting reflexive processes. We then discuss the NMP approach and present various narrative excerpts taken from the transcripts of one group of underachieving students who participated in the counseling sessions.

A semiotic and psychodynamic conceptualization of reflexive process: reflection and reflexivity

Throughout the years, many models of reflexive process have been developed (e.g., Bleakley, 2006) and reflexive processes have been equated with metacognition, introspection, and critical thinking (Moore, 2011).

Many of these models concur in describing reflection as the result of various levels of complexity. For example, in pedagogy, Mezirow (1990) distinguished four levels of increasing complexity (habitual action/non-reflection, understanding, reflection, and critical reflection). Burkitt (2012) identified two levels in sociology: self-reflection and reflexivity.

Moreover, there has been a shift in conceiving of reflexive process from an individual function (often defined as self-reflection and linked to the concept of introspection) to the idea of the reflexive process as an intersubjective product that emerges through dialogical exchange among people who share the same context (Valsiner, 2007).

We have recently presented a conceptualization of reflexive process that fits within the debate on reflexivity and that has many dimensions and is an intersubjective process. According to this conceptualization, reflexive processes are to be discussed within a semiotic and psychodynamic perspective and may be conceived as constituted by two distinct levels of complexity (Esposito & Freda, 2016; Esposito, Freda, & De Luca Picione, 2016; Freda, De Luca Picione, & Esposito, 2015). The conceptualization is based on two issues that have been poorly addressed in the literature on reflexive processes: a conception of emotions as regulators of sense-making processes and an intersubjective declination of emotions that considers the relationship between individual and context.

Rather than being identified as variables that interfere or threaten the linearity and rationality of relational processes, emotions may be understood as the matrix of thought (Matte Blanco, 1975), an unconscious mode of operation of the mind that generalizes and homogenizes the field of experience. This process of categorization that does not focus on the characteristics of the specific event but instead treats it in terms of class or category of similar experiences is referred to as “emotional semiosis” (Freda, 2011; Salvatore, 2011). Moreover, the affective process cannot be understood in intra-psychological terms, as being confined to the head, since it has a semiotic and dialogical nature. Affective meaning is a collective product, performed through individual minds, and it emerges through and in terms of how people combine signs according to the cultural context they are part of and that they contribute to building (Salvatore & Freda, 2011).

We assume reflexive processes to be ever more analytical and complex mechanisms of experience differentiation. Furthermore, we propose a distinction between two levels of reflexive process: reflection and reflexivity.

Reflection is the psychological process through which individuals are able to gain new understandings of themselves and recognize themselves as subjective entities of semiotic production (i.e., they reflect themselves). Take the case of an underachieving university student who states the following:

“I have always thought myself to be a victim of the ugliness of some professors and of some mates. Now I realize I am just an insecure and weak person.”

The narrative informs us of a new way to give meaning to the self within a specific context (weak, insecure) that contrasts with the role of victim the student has previously conformed to.

Reflection has been conceived as an important step toward reaching reflexivity. Reflexivity is a semiotic process of transformation by considering one’s own perspective and the way it directs the self, giving meaning to relational processes. Through reflexivity, subjects are able to think about the relational processes in which they are involved. The subject is consequently able to give a new meaning to a process (not to the self ) and to recognize the active role assumed in guiding events. This equates to understanding that one co-constructs relationships not only because of external causes but also because of internal reasons and desires that drive human action. For example, recall the case of the female student who describes her feeling of being insecure and weak. She continues the same narrative by saying:

“the more I thought I was a victim, the more I could not change my situation of isolation from everyone. Now I realize that conceiving of myself as a victim of professors was just an excuse to be noticed, to say that I exist at the university. It seems paradoxical, but I tried to hide in order to be noticed, I hoped someone, sooner or later, would notice me and invite me to participate in group class work.”

In this narrative, the student is not so much involved in a process of signification as a way of being but is instead immersed in a way of acting within a relational context. She acknowledges the emotional dynamic enacted; she had directed her complaints against the university and defined herself as a victim to be noticed by others.

Multimodal narrative methodology and reflexive process

The relevance of narrative approaches in counseling is not new. Many narrative models (e.g., Savickas, 2005) focus on various problems and integrate different counseling intervention settings (Richardson, 2012). According to Murdock, Dual, and Nilsonn (2012), the narrative approach to counseling presents a well-defined theoretical structure supported by a considerable body of empirical research. Several authors have acknowledged the centrality of telling stories and have described how narratives play an important role in giving meaning to one’s own experience (Bruner, 1990). Subjects are conceived as active storytellers who organize their multiple life experiences into coherent stories that they share with others in an intersubjective process of meaning construction.

Thus, narration plays a key role in the promotion of reflexive processes, as this requires that the information presents itself in the form of representation. It requires that the information represents itself (from the Latin re-ad-praesentare = representation, make present again). Representation allows the activation of a reflexive process. According to a semiotic model of the mind (Valsiner, 2007), the construction of a text is a semiotic process generated by emotions while, at the same time, symbolizing them by representing them as words (Freda, 2011).

Several examples have been provided in the literature regarding the use of multiple narrative devices in the same intervention for the promotion of reflexive processes. When this happens, it is preferable to define the narrative approach as a multimodal narrative approach (Pink, 2011). Multimodality uses multiple modes and media associated with specific sensory channels. It has been considered effective in promoting reflexive processes (Pink, 2011). Multimodality is “a new multi-semiotic form in which meaning is produced through the inter-relationships between and among different media and modes” (Dicks, Soyinka, & Coffey, 2006, p. 78). Using multiple media makes it possible to create new realities of meaning and knowledge to promote an understanding of the com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Counseling and coaching in times of crisis and transition: an introduction
• Part I Approaches, methodologies and techniques for counseling and coaching
• Part II Career counseling and counseling for professional life
• Part III Counseling and coaching actions for wellbeing and inclusion
• Conclusion: ideas for the future of counseling and coaching
• Index