Counsellors becoming counsellor educators: a New Zealand example

ABSTRACT

The international literature on adjunct faculty in higher education, including professional education, does not yet cover counsellor education in particular, although many programmes rely on the teaching services of experienced practitioners in adjunct faculty positions. This article reports on a small, exploratory study conducted with adjunct faculty members appointed to one-year, full time fellowships in the counsellor education programme in which the authors are full time academics. The study identifies the mutual benefits of this practice, to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty and to the counsellor education programme. It also identifies areas that are problematic. In view both of the identified benefits and the difficulties experienced, the authors discuss their responsibilities as permanent academic staff to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty. The authors suggest that programmes benefit from the ethic of hospitality that adjunct faculty can offer and invite academic staff to bring (un)conditional hospitality to the collegial relationship in counsellor education.

Keywords:

• counsellor education
• adjunct faculty
• hospitality
• collegial teaching community

Notes

1. For the sake of brevity, we refer to practitioners who hold part time, temporary, contract teaching positions as ‘adjunct faculty’, the term most common in the US, while acknowledging that for some the term ‘temporary workers’, as used by Bryson and Blackwell (2006) in the UK, might more accurately describe their employment status.

2. In referring to our Visiting Teaching Fellow colleagues as a group, we commonly called them VTFs, and in this article we use this abbreviation. Our use of this abbreviation may have objectifying effects that appear dissonant with our arguments for hospitality and relationship. However, our feminist sensibilities got in the way of us referring to our colleagues as ‘Fellows’.

3. This concept comes from Davies et al. (2006) who used this bracketed form to illustrate the in-the-moment constitutive actions of discourse.

4. Drawing on the work of Butler, Davies (2006) suggested that in order to have mastery on the terms of a particular discourse, we must submit ourselves to the terms of that discourse. Davies showed the sophistication of a subject simultaneously submitting to and thus mastering a particular discourse, and so disturbing the terms of the discourse itself.

5. An institutional decision was made to make a full time and permanent appointment.