A narrative approach to school counselling

Abstract

An approach to the work of a school counsellor which is informed strongly by narrative ideas about counselling offers some distinctive ways of thinking about practice as well as some distinctive and effective practices. With foundations in social constructionist thinking the narrative approach allows counsellors to conceptualise the issues that arise in young people's lives in terms of the discourses or stories that give shape to their lives. This article will demonstrate how this perspective can be translated into some ways of talking in school contexts that avoid internalising deficits in young people and maximise the opportunities for developing counterplots to the dominant stories that young people are oppressed by.