Week 11

For Week 11 you continue on in a similar fashion to Weeks 9 and 10. This time, however, you address the emotions/sensations domain of human functioning. As noted below, this lesson also replaces common factors analysis with discursive analysis.

Diligent completion of this week’s readings and learning activities for Assignment 3 will enable you to more competently enact the following attitudes, knowledge, and skills:

1. Link counselling models to the major domains of human functioning (e.g., cognitive, affective behavior, relational).
2. Situate counselling models relative to their respective historical contexts.
3. Situate counselling models relative to various cultural and developmental contexts.
4. Identify assumptive underpinnings counsellign models discussed (e.g., prescriptive, causal, paradigmatic).
5. Evaluate the evidentiary base for counselling models discussed.
6. Conduct a discursive analysis of the language used within prominent counselling models.

These learning outcomes are met through both the wiki and class discussion components of this assignment.

1. Working with emotions/sensations (group activity + wiki)

In the current week, your group is required to add the required content for working with emotions/sensations to your wiki page.

2. Working with emotions/sensations (class discussion)

By this time, you likely will have come to specific conclusions about the presence of common factors across a broad range of counselling models and the role that common factors play in facilitating client change. You will also have developed a critical view on how they are defined, conceptualized, and empirically supported. For the final two weeks, you are invited to continue to reflect on the common factors questionfor as long as you find new, relevant insights and understandings arising.

We now, however, add another layer to the conversation. This layer stands apart from the common factors discussions and, instead, relates back to our focus on assumptions. To this end, all along you have been asked to “strip,” so to speak, the models of their jargon; the intent of this deconstructive exercise has been to facilitate meaningful and enlightening comparisons across models that typically position themselves very differently from each other.

Our new layer calls close attention to how language is used within counselling models; this approach is often referred to as discursive analysis, which in simple terms is the analysis of how meaning is constructed through social discourse. In even simpler terms, it refers to paying attention to how language use serves to convey meaning and to the ways in which meaning can have real effects on people’s lives.

It is possible to bring a discursive perspective to any model, and so, even though you are being invited to reflect upon the models discussed in the final two wiki weeks, such reflection is equally pertinent to the models that came before. For this reason, when addressing this subject matter, you are encouraged to also attend to “discursive insights” that arise through your contemplation of the models used in Weeks 9 and 10.

A common outcome of discursive analysis is the identification of implicit assumptions, which is why it fits so nicely with the wiki activities. Consider the following illustration, taken from the hunting assumptions example article provided in Week 4, where the author states: “The goal of this phase is social control: that is, control of the individual's own tendency to manipulate other people in destructive or wasteful ways, and of his [sic] tendency to respond without insight or option to the manipulations of others” (p.23). Deconstructing the language used in this short, yet provocative, sentence, uncovers the following paradigmatic assumptions:

1. People come to therapy unable to control themselves.
2. People are inherently manipulative and hurtful.
3. People lack the capacity to recognize their manipulative and hurtful ways.

Although a counsellor using this model might not explicitly use such words while in session, the language nonetheless betrays meanings that could lead to negative perceptions (and treatment) of one’s client. The third discussion question this week, and Week 12 in its entirety, both address this discursive perspective.

Upon completing your required content and reading your peers’ wikis you are required to respond to two of the questions in the designated class discussion Moodle.