remnants of remnants

I’ve just started a 12-week course at a nearby college which will hopefully lead to a Level 2 award in counselling skills. The main part of my assessment for the course is a weekly ‘reflective journal’ which is supposed to track my thoughts and feelings over the duration of the course, including what I enjoy, what I find difficult, and if there are things that concern or puzzle me. Since I already have a blog which hardly anyone reads (and which I usually ignore myself for most of the year), I reckon I may as well use this to record my thoughts.

So it’s week 1 of the course. The session last Tuesday was introductory and mostly pretty straightforward. The group met (about a dozen of us), chatted to each other, looked at some very brief introductory definitions related to counselling, and went away again. The structure of the course seems pretty vague — I was expecting a schema showing what we’d be looking at each week, but no such schema was forthcoming, and in fact when someone asked for some detail on what we’d be covering, the reply was equally vague, listing only a couple of very general areas plus “lots of practice”. Oh well, I suppose I don’t much mind. There’s no particular reason why I’d need to know in advance what to expect.

We were given a little slip of paper with some suggestions for this journal entry. One of these was ‘Reflect on your decision to start a Counselling course at this time in your life’, which I suppose is counselling-speak for ‘What are you doing here?’. One thing that struck me during the first session was the variety of different answers people gave to that question. Some of the group work in roles where they interact with vulnerable people a lot, so counselling skills will be professionally beneficial. Others are thinking about a career change and wondering if counselling is for them.

I don’t have anything quite as specific to point to — I’ve been thinking about learning about counselling for about four years, ever since a trainer in a previous job suggested that I might be good at it — and I guess this is the first time since then that I’ve had the money, the spare time and the motivation all in one go! But I don’t particularly intend to change careers. I guess I’m doing the course partly because I hope I’ll gain some practical skills, or improve any I already have, and partly because I’m interested in exactly what ‘proper counselling’ (rather than just ‘chatting nicely to people’) actually involves. I’d like to put it in some more structured theoretical context.

Having said that, in the first session our tutor seemed very keen to reassure everyone that one thing the course wouldn’t do would be to put anything in a structured theoretical context! It wouldn’t be too academic, it wouldn’t involve learning theories, it was going to be mostly about practical skills and so on. I get the impression that she often teaches people for whom the idea of studying and writing (or even sitting in a classroom!) can cause some anxiety. I guess some people in the group might not have done much classroom-type education since their school days, so it’s fair enough to try and reassure them in that way. I guess I’m lucky because I do quite a lot of work in universities, including some small-group teaching, so sitting and studying is nothing new to me; I’m not expecting to be particularly fazed by the idea of being on a course, or of having to write a weekly reflective journal. I spend most of my working life writing stuff. It’s no big deal. If anything, I’d have been happier if there was less writing and more practical sessions, purely because I was hoping to get away from having to write all the time — but that may yet prove to be the case. We’ll see.

By the way, weird coincidence of the week: there’s only one man in the group apart from me, and he turned out to come from Ripponden in West Yorkshire, very close to the village where I grew up. His brother was in the year above me at secondary school! Bizarre!