Ethical and Legal Issues for Counsellors represented an entirely new perspective for me within the world of education. Having never considered becoming a guidance counsellor before, I have to admit that I rarely looked at students through that lens before taking this course. In fact, because guidance counsellors often have to advocate for students that are a difficult fit in a traditional classroom, I sometimes have had an adversarial relationship with the role of guidance counsellor at times. This blind spot in my sight of public education meant that this was an excellent elective for me to take, and as a result I now have a much more complete picture of the student body than I did before.
I learned that there is a lot of legal and moral crossover between the roles of teacher and guidance counsellor that I wasn’t aware of before. The idea of comparing legal vs ethical standards and deciding to have a plan in place for certain high-risk situations was all new to me. I think that this is so fundamental to understanding the true nature of our job as adults in authoritative roles that deal with minors, that it should be given curriculum space at the undergraduate level. I really enjoyed how the course allowed us to work through scenarios where there was a whole lot of “grey area” that required some detailed reasoning as a group to work through.
The artefact I chose to highlight from Ethical and Legal Issues for Counsellors is the paper I wrote about the “Duty to Warn” and the much-cited Tarasoff precedent. I researched how someone in a counselling situation (which we are frequently in as teachers, not only as guidance counsellors) needs to think about their responsibilities to both their clients and society. While it was interesting to examine the complexities of this relationship, it was also very scary from my perspective considering my “clients” are not noted for being consistently stable and well-adjusted and as a group are at a turbulent point in their lives.