This research sets out to explore how counsellor trainers understand and experience their role in the context of early twenty-first century Britain. The training sector is facing significant pressures connected with the shifting context for counselling and changes within the educational sector itself. These are occurring against a wider backdrop of economic recession and a lack of published research into rank-and-file trainer experiences and viewpoints. The methodology of choice is Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a qualitative approach which focuses on the production of rich individual accounts of subjective experience. Sixteen trainers were recruited from across Great Britain via purposeful convenience sampling using the professional networks of the researcher, herself a trainer. The trainers were individually interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. The result is four separate but interconnected studies of the experiencing and understanding of the role on the part of trainers within programmes based on person-centred, integrative, psychodynamic and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) approaches. The four studies are analysed separately and contextualised within the literature. Tentative overall themes are then drawn out and implications discussed. The findings highlight the multifaceted and demanding nature of the training role. A commonality and difference in understanding of the role is evident across the studies. Discernible differences focus primarily on the relational nature of the role and the centrality accorded to critical thinking and the evidence-base. There are also different levels of identification and reconciliation expressed in relation to professionalising processes. A dominant finding in terms of the experience of the role is its high-reward and high-stress nature. Across all four studies, there is an identifiable vulnerability to substantial levels of stress and a developed potential for burnout. Workload pressures, the emotional demands of the role, a limited sense of autonomy and a perceived lack of appropriate support are among some of the major factors cited. In parallel trainers report a high level of reward and vocational commitment. The experience of the role’s rewards and challenges is a dynamic one, the balance shifting in the longer or shorter term. The context of the work carries significance with trainers in the private sector reporting substantially less stress. On a wider note, the shifting professional, educational and economic contexts are perceived as adding a new note of threat and uncertainty and leading some trainers to question their vocational commitment. The continuing divisions amongst differing theoretical schools are evident as well as a continued sense of non-belonging within institutional contexts. The findings are not presented as generalisable truths but as a contribution to the development of a case-based context-dependent understanding, regarded as important to effective practitioner development.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Educational Leadership, 2009. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-115).

This thesis aims - based on my detailed analysis of the first one of the three Heidegger's lectures on The Nature of Language (Das Wesen der Sprache 1957/58) in which he deals with the possibility of undergoing the experience of speech with the support of the onto-logical starting point, which is overcome by meaning-compliant thinking (besinnlicher Nachdenken) into a poetic experience with a word and with its relation to the entity and non-entity of a thing from the poem by Stefan Georg titled The Word (Das Wort) - to contemplate on the assumptions and limits of the apprehension of the philosophically-educative questioning as the nurture towards thinking, which should inevitably be preceded by the knowledge about what it means to be or not to be brought up in thinking. KEYWORDS education, human being, language, experience, poetry, thinking, Heidegger

The aim of this paper was to analyse foregrounding elements in Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” The analysis shows that deviances from everyday non-literary language, i.e. foregrounding, are both likely to evoke defamiliarisation in readers and also provide readers with the likelihood of having an aesthetic experience. This has been done by adhering to the literary theory of Cognitive stylistics and to its related literary concepts, namely the theory of foregrounding. Furthermore, this paper also aimed to provide examples of how “Digging” can be taught in a pedagogical setting. In short, this paper argues for a teaching of poetry that focuses on the sensual aesthetic qualities in a poem. Therefore, this paper supports the claim that students need to attentively read, watch and perform poetry in order to experience its sounds and textures fully. Such an approach corresponds well to an aesthetic education which aims at developing, in students, a heightened awareness of and appreciation for all that touches our lives. Lastly, the pedagogical implementations showed that a foregrounding analysis of “Digging” can be fruitful to incorporate in the EFL classroom. Apart from evoking defamiliarisation and aesthetic reactions, a stylistic analysis can also serve to raise students' linguistic and literary awareness. As a result, students can discover why poets make particular language choices as well as develop their ability to interpret literary works.

This diploma thesis of a didactic character presents use of specific methods of personal and social education in leisure time centers through methodical cards linked with educational technologies. These methodical cards were made and practically proven by the implementer of this thesis together with leisure-time activities teachers and subsequently critically evaluated. Research methods were used for a comparison of my personal experience with methodical cards and the experience of each participant, where at least 3 teachers commented on 1 methodological card, as well as the qualitative semi-structured interview, which found out the possibilities and limits of the use of these methodical cards and the quantitative research study in the form of a questionnaire, which is used to get an overview of the needs of leisure-time activities teachers. Based on that, it creates detailed methodological cards. The result was that all 10 developed and practically proven methodological cards are under specific conditions have practical use.