Strength-based school counsellors’ experiences of counselling in New Zealand

ABSTRACT

This article presents New Zealand school counsellors’ narratives of counselling adolescents from a strength-based perspective. Strength-based counselling encompasses several counselling modalities including positive psychology, narrative and solution-focused brief counselling and promotes adolescents’ strengths to enhance wellbeing. Using semi-structured interviews, eight secondary school counsellors with a strength-based practice focus were interviewed. Narrative analysis drawing on a categorical-content mode of reading across participants’ narrative data showed that the school context plays a significant role in shaping counsellors’ practice. Metanarratives of both strength and deficit, and metanarratives of the school context were identified as having an impact on counsellors’ strength-based practices. Dominant deficit metanarratives were juxtaposed with metanarratives of strength. Implications of how counsellors negotiate counselling in a school context are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• School counsellor
• strength-based counselling
• school context
• counselling in schools
• narrative analysis

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Charmaine Bright

Charmaine Bright is a trained counsellor, Undergraduate Psychology Programme Leader and Lecturer at AUT University’s Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, New Zealand. Her research and practice interests include positive psychology and resilience, strength-based counselling, relational trauma and attachment.

Nesta Devine

Nesta Devine is a Professor of Education at AUT University’s Faculty of Culture and Society, New Zealand. Her research reflects the common thread of disrupting assumptions. Spanning education policy and theory, prison education, Pasifika teachers, and school exclusion, her research challenges the conventional ways of thinking that can lead to inequities for different groups of learners.

Elizabeth Du Preez

Elizabeth Du Preez is a trained counselling and clinical psychologist and senior psychology lecturer at AUT University’s Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, New Zealand. At AUT she is involved in teaching, research and supervision on the postgraduate programme in counselling psychology. She has an interest in the wellbeing of LGBTIQ students and is involved in research in this area.

Sonja Goedeke

Sonja Goedeke is a trained clinical psychologist and senior psychology Lecturer at AUT University’s Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, New Zealand. Her main practice and research interests lie in infertility and the psychosocial and ethical implications of assisted reproductive technologies.