Doing the right thing: positioning the adult learner through discourses of guidance and counselling
Roger Harrison, Open University, UK
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 29th Annual Conference, 5-7 July 1999, University of Warwick
Introduction
The genealogy of this paper lies in the experience of working on open learning courses in personal development, and in guidance and counselling. As areas of professional practice they share certain assumptions about the nature of personal identity and the possibilities for personal change; for instance that individuals have a core identity discoverable through a process of guided reflection, and that future development paths can usefully be subject to processes of rational planning. Concurrent with this course development work has been an increased exposure to theoretical interpretations of education, guidance and counselling as forms of cultural practice active in shaping the identities of both teachers and learners. The challenge presented by these theoretical frameworks have shifted my own stance, producing changes in understandings and in practices; a revision of what it means to be an adult educator.
This brief description of context is important for two reasons; first it makes the point that behind the disembodied voice of the distance educator exists the ‘troubled’ practitioner, reflexively locating and relocating in relation to existing ‘tribes’ (Bauman, 1991 ) and ‘borders’( Giroux, H. 1992). Second it supports a view of professional development which resonates with my own experience, viewing it as a complex interaction between practical and theoretical forms of knowing; one in which practitioners develop ‘practical theory’ through relating personal constructs with ‘alternative ways of understanding’ provided by relevant theoretical frameworks (Irving and Williams, 1995).
The feature of educational change which I want to address in this paper is the incorporation of discourses and practices of guidance and counselling into those of teaching and learning, the effects of this on practices of adult learning and on the image or character of the adult learner. One such pedagogical practice is the process of personal development planning, often embedded in open learning texts and linked with processes of recording achievement, action planning, educational and career guidance. Among the effects of these practices is to support a particular construction of the learner as an autonomous, self-steering individual who has internalised the techniques and processes of personal and career decision making; who can successfully and independently negotiate the insecurities and uncertainties of modern living. For the adult learner, ‘doing the right thing’ becomes the self administration of techniques and strategies derived from the practices of guidance and counselling to produce flexible and adaptable learners, actively engaging in the construction of the self as a ‘reflexive project’ (Giddens, 1991, 32). How far this results in the empowering of learners, and how far it can be read as the spread of a more subtle pastoral form of governmentality is open to question.
The objective here is neither to advocate or denigrate these progressive educational practices, but to examine the conditions which have brought them about and the effects they have on our notions of learning, and what it means to be a learner.
Common ground
Whilst the practices of teaching guiding and counselling each has its own distinct history, values and processes, they also have a good deal in common.
They have similar aims; in supporting and promoting notions of development and change, and to varying degrees, in engaging individuals in taking responsibility for and control over their own development. They share similar underpinning values and beliefs, and promote an essentially positive and optimistic view of the world, emphasising individuality, self improvement, empowerment and personal development. McNair, for instance, suggests that ‘adult learning is about the ‘re-creation of the individual’ (McNair, 1996a:238).
They take a similar professional stance towards their user or client group; most definitions of guidance, counselling and learner-centred learning stress the role of the professional as a facilitator rather than a director of change, since it is the learner or client who holds the power to actually make changes or to assimilate new learning. Part of the British Association of Counsellors definition of counselling is
to give the ‘client’ an opportunity to explore, discover and clarify ways of living more satisfyingly and resourcefully. (BAC, 1984)
Rogers (1998) describes the goal of education as the facilitation of change and learning, and moves easily between describing the process of ‘learner-centred learning and ‘client-centred therapy’, in each case emphasising the unique capacity of the individual to make their own meanings and shape their own development. In the same vein the androgogical tradition emphasises ‘the unique goals and interests of individual learners and places these as central in the teaching and learning process’ (Boud, 1989).
They use similar processes. McLeod (1998) describes counselling as a learning process in which counsellor and user participate, rather than as a specific set of techniques which are applied by the practitioner. The Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education (UDACE) drew attention to the essential continuity between processes of teaching and guidance in a number of its publications (UDACE, 1986; Oakshott, 1991). Models of reflective learning (Boud, Keogh and Walker, 1996) and reflective practice (Schon, 1983) describe a process through which new meanings are formed and new understandings attained, mirroring the processes of guidance and counselling. Alheit (1995) describes the task of adult education in terms of ‘biographical coaching’,
‘the joint discovery by teacher and learner of biographical opportunities for shaping social, occupational and political existence more autonomously’ (Alheit, 1995. 68)
From the user, client or learner perspective parallels are found in the experiences of participating in learning, guidance and counselling. Reports suggest that the feelings associated with reflecting on ones’ own experiences or current practices, and contemplating the possibility of change, can be uncomfortable and even alarming. In discussing the effects of using reflection in learning, Brookfield (1994) writes of uncertainty and perplexity and Butler (1996) suggests that the attainment of new understandings is often accompanied by ‘a period of discomfort, when learning appears to be erratic and confused’ (Butler, 1996, p.276).
Changing context
There are powerful contextual reasons for processes of guidance and counselling to become incorporated into pedagogical practices. The process of industrialisation and related social change has been accompanied by growth in both counselling (McLeod, 1998) and guidance (Killeen, 1996) as individuals seek ways of making sense of their lives in a ‘post-traditional’ social order. As faith in the narrative of progress and the authority of traditional institutions has come into question, and as the security conferred by an established social and economic order has been eroded, the responsibility for shaping the self is located increasingly with individuals. In the post-industrial setting the individual becomes ‘actor, designer, juggler and stage director of his or her own biography, identity, social networks, commitments and convictions’ (Beck, 94:14). The established role of education in providing a pathway towards psychological and material security and increased personal agency remains the same, but its tactics and pedagogies are changing to meet the changing circumstances. The incorporation of guidance and counselling into learning can be read, at least in part, as a response to the challenge posed by the ‘reflexive project’ of the self.
A more immediate and pragmatic reason for the integration of guidance and counselling into learning is the growing diversity and complexity of lifelong learning, as flexibilities in curricula, institutional frameworks and forms of assessment are introduced. As the choices available in terms of when, where, what and how to study have multiplied, so have the demands on guidance and counselling as a means of facilitating, informing and supporting decision making processes. The notion of lifelong learning and the ‘portfolio career’ (Handy, 1996) suggests the need for lifelong guidance, as learners are obliged to constantly monitor and review their own developmental pathways.
Lifelong flexibility and lifelong education and training are creating the conditions for lifelong guidance. (Killeen, 1996:18)
At an institutional level within the UK, a further contextual factor has been the dramatic rise in student numbers in further and higher education, together with a reduction in per-capita resources. The dilemma for many institutions has been the choice between rationing traditional career counselling interviews or changing the nature of the services they provide. In many cases the response has been to embed careers guidance in open learning packages, partly as a resource efficient means of reaching a wider audience, and partly in a conscious effort to shift the locus of responsibility for career management and guidance away from the organisation and towards the individual (Ball and Jordan, 1997).
These trends have been actively promoted through development project funding, from ‘Enterprise in Higher Education’ and ‘Education for Capability’ in the 1980’s to ‘Guidance and Learner Autonomy’ and ‘Learner Managed Learning’ in the 1990’s. A key aim of these programmes has been the development of autonomous learners, capable of managing their own educational and career development, using skills of self assessment, context assessment, decision making and transition skills. The associated pedagogies of profiling, recording achievement and personal development planning have emerged out of a new alignment between curriculum teaching and careers guidance, combining around the central aim of enabling individual learners to take responsibility for, and control over, their own development (Watts and Hawthorn, 1992; McNair, 1996b). In doing so they have created a bridge between the professional concern of careers educationalists with ‘learning for work’, and the concern of curriculum teachers with student-centred approaches to ‘learning to learn’.
In parallel with a move towards student centred learning, a career planning approach is emerging, in which learners take responsibility for the management of their own career development, in contrast to the more teacher-centred model implied in existing assumptions about careers education. (Ball and Butcher, 1994:13)
Here links are being established between a 'career planning' approach to guidance and a 'student centred' approach to learning which position both as more liberal and more progessive than the alternatives of directive guidance, and teacher-centred education. The ‘expert model’ in which the user, client or learner is the passive recipient of knowledge, information or advice is apparently displaced by one in which individuals develop their own capabilities in managing learning and career choice.
Interpreting change: the practitioners’ dilemma
On one reading these developments appear to offer a fortuitous alliance of humanistic, person centred approaches; a welcome alternative to traditional discipline based practices; one which values and privileges the lived experience of the learner. Models which draw on Kolb’s (1993) experiential learning cycle, Egan’s (1996) skilled helper model of counselling, and the DOTS (Law and Watts, 1977)) model of guidance, jostle with each other in programmes of adult, further and higher education. Learners are provided with a set of techniques for personal development planning which appear to offer a neutral and transparent template onto which personal experience can be transposed and analysed. Experience is ‘mined’ for what it can reveal about personal resources, including skills, abilities and dispositions. Like the practices of guidance and counselling they are instrumental in generating a narrative of experience which opens it up to rational examination and systematic analysis; an apparently generic model of problem solving which can be used by anyone in relation to any life stage or any life transition. Through the self-administration of techniques derived from guidance and counselling individuals are offered the means to become empowered, self confident and self-directing. The offer closely resembles that presented by counselling and psychotherapy; a route to personal growth, self actualisation and autonomy.
What is not acknowledged in this account is the way in which any representation of self or individuality or identity is only one version among the many which are possible, and that the means by which accounts are elicited play a vital role in shaping the account itself. As Bruner (1987) has noted:
The ways of telling and the ways of conceptualising that go with them become recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into memory, for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present but directing it into the future Bruner, 1987, 31)
The creation of personal narratives has been linked with a need to secure a sense of meaning in our lives. Different traditions refer to this as the meaning-giving, self determining, self-creating or self-constructing aspect of human nature. What people find meaningful about themselves and their world is expressed through language, metaphores, narratives and autobiography. (Kenyon, 1996). As Bruner suggests, not only do we all have stories to tell, we are stories; 'we become the autobiographical narratives by which we tell about our lives' (Bruner, 1987:15).
But there is more than one story. We are private or economic stories, family stories, emotional stories and cultural stories, and these do not eaily fit within one coherent all-embracing narrative. This point is pushed further within the postmodern analysis which suggests an essentially fragmented self, with no possibility for the discernment of an organising pattern, unity or purpose within any single life story.
Under postmodern conditions, persons exist in a state of continuous construction and re-construction; it is a world where anything goes that can be negotiated. Each reality of the self gives way to a reflexive questioning, irony, and ultimately the playful probing of yet another reality. The centre does not hold. (Gergen, 1992: 7)
Narratives of the self are both powerful, as part of the way we make sense of the world and our position within it; and negotiable, in that there are many narratives which could be told about ourselves, and these are always open to revision. In these circumstances the process of guiding the construction of biographical narrative deserves close scrutiny, since it operates not simply to open up opportunity for self understanding and rational planning, but also to shape and contain the possibilities for personal identity. As Usher and Edwards (1998) put it:
life planning books and programmes are as much subject to a limiting of options within certain parameters as they are expanders of opportunity - the rainbows and parachutes people are invited to build for themselves only have so many colours..(Usher and Edwards 1998, 218)
In this sense the range of technologies for self development and learning: records of achievement, personal development log books, computer based profiling systems, self assessment exercises, can be understood as technologies for the governance of individual conduct; as ‘techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities’ (Foucault, 1977: 218). They are effective in shaping the capacities and inclinations of individuals, not through coercion, but by engaging individuals in their own self formation. This ‘pastoral’ form of governance ‘enables individuals to actively participate in disciplinary regimes through investing their own identity, subjectivities and desires with those ascribed to them by certain knowledgeable discourses’ (Usher and Edwards, 1998: 215). It allows governmentality to act not only on the behaviour and external appearance of individuals, but also on their inner lives - ‘the entry of the soul of the citizen into the sphere of government (Rose, 1990:113). Through processes of recording achievement and personal development planning learners come to identify with new words, images and conceptualisations of what it means to be a learner, of how learners behave, talk about themselves and express themselves in the world. They provide a structure and a vocabulary which values and recognises certain kinds of subjectivity, bringing into view particular forms of experience and aspiration and suggesting certain kinds of outcomes. The spaces in which learners are invited to insert their own experiences and preferences are not, in this analysis, as innocent as they might appear, but already inscribed with certain expectations and understandings. The self knowledge which is being elicited and validated here is only one among many possible accounts of the identity of the learner. Whilst the explicit purpose is to open up choice and opportunity, in so doing it also brings closure, both to understandings of what it means to be a person in the world, and also of what is ‘realistic’ for a person to expect from the world.
Practice imperfect
Forms of analysis which serve to problematise taken-for-granted understandings and assumptions about the processes of learning and forms of identity which these engender do not progress smoothly towards clear guidelines for action and for practice. What they do achieve is to expose the field of practice as a site of contest - one in which the very subjectivity of learners is the prize. The emergence of guidance and counselling in a more central role within education has contributed towards a discursive re-conceptualisation of the learner and of learning, but this is itself open to contestation and re-evaluation. The discipline of personal development planning might well be a powerful influence in shaping and moulding learner subjectivities, but this does not over-ride the possibilities for resistance and the assertion of difference. Adult educators have a significant role to play here; in reflexively locating current practices in their wider social, economic and cultural context; in questioning the categories and spaces available for self definition; and in exploring possibilities for different kinds of learner identity.