Guidance and Counselling BA (Hons)

You will develop your understanding of academic conventions in UK higher education aligned to your level of study, including expectations around critical analysis, structure, argumentation, evidencing, and referencing. The module focuses on developing communication strategies that will help you express your ideas clearly and coherently in written assignments and spoken activities. You will also reflect on your current academic and language skills and develop strategies for development ahead of your assessments.

You will explore the theory and practice of mentoring, focusing on the use of both group and individual approaches in developing and enhancing the mentoring relationship. You will recognise the core guidance and counselling skills inherent in the mentoring role and apply them with 1st year undergraduates. You will undertake research into the effectiveness of mentoring across the life course and within educational, business and community settings.

You will explore the theory and practice of a range of helping processes drawn from differing contexts and critical perspectives. Attention is given to individual approaches to helping and initiating change. This will include the exploration of counselling within specific contexts (e.g. Transcultural, feminist, online etc.) and representations of helping in the media. There will also be an opportunity to explore critical views of counselling paradigms that have been developed within the disabled people’s movement and other sociological perspectives.

The aim of the module is to provide you with an opportunity to explore potential career pathways and develop an understanding of professional roles by undertaking a career development project. Exploring entry routes and requirements of occupations through a range of sources, including direct contact with professionals, will further develop research skills as well as develop and utilise networks to help you to enhance your employability. You will conduct a study into a chosen professional area, reflect critically upon a range of academic and work related experiences and consider how these have informed your career identity and contributed to the development of graduate attributes and employability skills. You will complete an application and undertake a mock interview in which you will be supported to reflect upon and verbally articulate your graduate skills, attributes and values.

You will explore the theory and practice of group delivery within a Guidance and Counselling context, building upon experience gained within the ‘Developing Skills and Strategies for Helping’ module. Throughout the module you will be provided with knowledge and practical experience of working with groups, initially as a participant and later as a facilitator. You will study theoretical approaches to group work and group management, the latter including the skills of leadership and facilitation. You will gain practical experience of working in groups, beginning with low stakes activities to build your confidence. Ultimately you will be involved, with a small group of your peers, in the planning and delivery of a group work session. You will undertake personal research into the effectiveness of group delivery of guidance and counselling as the module proceeds.

This module will help you to further develop knowledge from the module ‘introduction to academic research’ through development of a deeper understanding of the research process.
The overall module aim is to support you in developing your research skills and knowledge. You will also further develop your ability to analyse and critique research literature and to consider its application to practice. The module will provide you with a strong grounding in a range of research methods. It will also enable you to understand the philosophical and theoretical frameworks that underpin these methods and the research process as a whole. Undertaking this module will help you to prepare for your final year dissertation / project

The aim of the module is to provide you with opportunities to further develop knowledge and skills to enable transition from graduate level to the world of work. This module provides you the opportunity to develop your employability and understanding of contemporary professional practice by participating in a work related learning opportunity. Experiences will be provided to enhance your professional skills in a workplace setting by exploring the realities of day to day practice. Learning experiences will also be also provided to enable you to gain an appreciation of the contribution of the reflective process in developing your professional practice and an understanding of professional roles and responsibilities within a multi-agency context. This will give you the opportunity to explore possible areas of career interest and gain relevant experience.

As part of your placement preparation you will attend a short series of lectures and workshops in which you will be introduced to models of reflective practice and key concepts and issues relating to contemporary professional practice such as organisational culture, professionalism, professional boundaries, ethics/codes of conduct and multi agency/ integrated working. As the placement unfolds you will reflect on your experiences and progress towards agreed professional development targets via a placement diary. These reflections will then be shared in seminars and tutorials with peers and a tutor who will provide formative feedback that will enable you to enrich your understanding of professional practice in the workplace.

This module invites you to explore the concept of ‘madness’ with a consideration of ‘mental health’, ‘distress’ and ‘wellbeing’ through the perspectives of mental health service users and/or ‘survivors’. The survivors’ movement reject biological and genetic explanations of their mental health, they celebrate their difference and challenge the legal constraints placed upon them. In essence this is a political alignment within both the ‘anti psychiatry’ and ‘holistic’ movements in the UK and internationally. This module will therefore introduce you to the principle theorists Foucault, Laing, Beresford and LeFrancois. In addition the contested importance of mental health ‘recovery’ in current mental health provision will be explored along with critical challenges to diagnosis, treatment and potential stigma. Recovery refers to the affirming process of discovering (or rediscovering) a positive sense of self and accepting and coping with the reality of any ongoing mental health distress. This in turn includes a critic of the biological determinism often associated with any mental health pathology. The module will take a historical perspective to the field of madness including topics of architecture and art as well as the early interpretations and treatments. Intersectionality will also be considered through the relative influences of gender, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation providing a fuller understanding of how these effect the mad narrative.

You will learn to identify, engage and apply a range of creative helping practices in the context of their programme of study. Students will be encouraged to develop a deeper understanding of alternatives to traditional interventions to allow for work with diverse communities and clients. You will explore the practicalities associated with engaging with alternative approaches, including the realities of accessing creative helping practices, developing engagement with clients, and understanding how these can support wellbeing across the life course. You will be introduced to a range of methods and supported to explore how these can be engaged with in practice.