Getting curious about meaning-making in counselling (1)1

¹An initial version of this paper was presented at the Canadian Counsellors’ Association Convention, Ottawa, 16 May 2002.

Abstract

Counselling offers many experimental opportunities from which counsellors can learn and develop their meaning-making skills. Recent developments in qualitative research, and in social constructionist approaches to counselling, point to new ways of conceptualising the conversations of counselling and guidance. In particular, a hermeneutic view of counselling attunes counsellors and guidance practitioners to the particular meanings and meaning-making potentials clients and students bring to counselling and guidance conversations. Accordingly, our questions and proposed solutions can be seen as engaging the meaning-making efforts of clients in ways we, and they, can learn from. Our conversations offer many potential experiments in meaning-making, should we think of what others do with what we say—as occurring across a gap of conversational potential. This article explores ways to adopt, and learn from, such a hermeneutic frame in our conversations with clients and students.

Notes

¹An initial version of this paper was presented at the Canadian Counsellors’ Association Convention, Ottawa, 16 May 2002.