impossible to carry out productive relationships between counsellors and learners.
7.3.2 Beliefs concerning the SAC counsellor.
In section 3.3.4 (p. 63), I talked about the counsellor in SAC. Everything I said is
reflected in the beliefs listed at the beginning of section 7.3 (p. 236). It is obvious that I
believe that the interaction between the learner and the counsellor is superficial (the latter
basically answers questions about location of materials), that there is a mismatch of
expectations and goals about counselling sessions, that most counselling sessions end up
as failed attempts to communicate or solve learner’s problems, that there is a tendency to
develop subjective (good∕bad) records about learners, and that counsellors are not aware
of these problems. And in fact there are good reasons to believe all of this.
However, I think that my attitude was not the right one. It is too idealistic to think
that all of these problems can be prevented. It is unreal to expect that all the counselling
encounters in SAC should be perfect. In spite of the fact that I am aware of all these
flaws, I myself experienced several sessions that were far from being perfect. The
analysis of my own performance and the beliefs that underlined it have made me realise
that I developed good and bad records of the participants, I made wrong decisions and I
handled some of their learning problems badly. All of this has also made me realise that
communication between counsellor and learner is human communication, and hence, it is
not free of flaws. As human beings, we are bound to develop good or bad records of our
interlocutors and our own beliefs and attitudes will inevitably manage our interaction
with others.
7.4 CONCLUSION
The writing of this chapter has been a difficult process. Analysing one’s own
beliefs is not an easy matter. Analysing one’s own beliefs means self-evaluation of
behaviours and attitudes. However, I think that it has also been a very rewarding
experience in several ways.
First, it has made me more secure about things that I already thought before, but I
did not have any evidence of. A good example of this is the belief I have always had that
being a counsellor implies, in several ways, the role of being a teacher. I played the role
of a teacher in two situations: teaching the learners about learning matters ( sharing part
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