I am slightly cautious about specialist agencies offering counselling courses for two reasons. First I think there are issues about whether skilled practitioners and theorists are necessarily good at teaching or enabling learning. Second, an agency commited to a particular approach or theory base may not be able to offer sufficient breadth of learning resources to cover learners' needs. This latter point also raises for me the possible advantages to learners of being in an institution with a broad population of other learners. I have had experience of playwork students taking radically new approaches to their work through interaction with speech therapy students, drawing inspiration from landscape architects and developing useful professional skills from social sciences students.
There are major problems with large institutions offering counselling courses. The lack of insight displayed by many managers is occasionally breathtaking, frightening and downright offensive. The brutality of large institutional management can be crushing. The temptation to withdraw into a specialist enclave in those circumstances is very attractive. I think though, that it is a price we must pay for breadth of student opportunity. The alternative is the kind of blinkered thinking so often evident in specialist training institutions such as medical schools.
Stephen Rennie, Leeds Metropolitan University
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Audrey Vollans [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 11:48 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: courses
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> At the risk of taking people back in time and sorry if it is a boring thread but I am struck that no-one seemed to reply to my request for feedback on specialist organisations offering counselling courses as opposed to FE colleges, given the inbuilt conflicts in that setting. What do people think? Do you think specialist training institutes have an elitist image - is that what people / potential students think? All comments welcome.
>
> All the best
> Audrey
>
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