Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 24: 351–354, 2011

Copyright
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1072-0537 print / 1521-0650 online

DOI: 10.1080/10720537.2011.593478

BOOK REVIEW

A CONSTRUCTIONIST FRAME FOR COUNSELOR

EDUCATION
Review of Handbook of Counselor Preparation: Constructivist, De-
velopmental, and Experiential Approaches
Edited by G. McAuliffe & K. Eriksen, published in coopera-
tion with the Association for Counselor Education and Su-
pervision (ACES)
Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2011, 448 pages, $89.95
(hardcover).
Reviewed by Gabriele Chiari, CESIPc

According to the American Counseling Association (2011),

“[c]ounseling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse
individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health,
wellness, education, and career goals.” A broad field of appli-
cation indeed, requiring a set of specific competencies suitable
for the complexity of the work. However, the Handbook of Coun-
selor Preparation: Constructivist, Developmental, and Experiential Ap-
proaches is not about counselor preparation. It is about the prepa-
ration of counselor educators and about how to prepare to teach
counseling.
I must confess that when I received the book, I was tempted
to decline reviewing it. Not being a counselor or a counselor ed-
ucator, but a personal construct psychotherapist and a teacher of
psychotherapy, I had only knowledge of books aimed at familiar-
izing clinical counselors with the personal construct approach to
counseling, but none of handbooks for graduate students training
to be counselor educators or for those who are already prepar-
ers of counselors. Moreover, in Italy counseling has a long history
but a recent formalization and is still surrounded by the suspicion
of being an illegal way of practicing psychotherapy for those not
qualified as such. Yet the more I browsed through the book, the
more I felt involved in its content.

351
352 Book Review

The subtitle promised to present constructivist, developmen-

tal, and experiential approaches. Although I could imagine that
the counselor education approach presented in the handbook
was framed according to a constructivist epistemology and that it
would make use of experiential methods, I could not see what “de-
velopmental” could mean in the context of teaching. Moreover,
going through the references and the author index, I could not
see any of the names I usually find in my constructivist readings:
George Kelly is quoted once, with reference to Greg Neimeyer’s
version of the Role Construct Repertory Test called career lad-
dering ; no trace of von Glasersfeld, von Foerster, Maturana, and
Varela, Bruner, to mention some of the most frequently quoted
authors whose names are linked to a constructivist epistemol-
ogy. On the other hand, the subject matter pertains to coun-
selor education rather than clinical psychology, with which I am
more familiar. Indeed, Piaget is given credit as the founder of the
constructive-developmental theory. In brief, I decided to read the
book.
The editors have a long experience in training counselors
and many publications behind them. Garrett J. McAuliffe is a pro-
fessor of counselor education at Old Dominion University in Nor-
folk, Virginia, and Karen P. Eriksen the founder and CEO of the
Eriksen Institute for Ethics, which promotes conscious and reflec-
tive leadership. In addition, the handbook has been published
in cooperation with the Association for Counselor Education and
Supervision (ACES), whose ultimate purpose is to advance coun-
selor education and supervision in order to improve the supply
of counseling services in all settings of society. The many contrib-
utors, as written in the Preface, have been recruited, vetted, and
edited to produce deep and accessible work.
The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 (Chapters 1–5, writ-
ten by McAuliffe) opens the discussion of constructivist and de-
velopmental teaching with principles and research. Here we find
that constructivism, taken as the guiding metaphor of the book,
is actually meant as social constructionism (an equation the social
constructionists might not welcome). The social construction of
meaning is emphasized, as is discourse (the socialized meaning
system that informs a person’s constructions) and deconstruction
(the act of seeking the roots of an idea in a particular discourse so
as to show it as contextual and questionable).
 Book Review 353

The developmental approach refers to how people come to

know something, to their epistemologies. Students of counseling
are supposed to use three overall ways of knowing drawn from
authors such as Kohlberg, Kegan, Perry, and Belensky. Received/
conventional knowing (or third order of consciousness) consists
in relying on external norms or authorities for what to think or
how to behave, and in seeing the received systems (culture, so-
cial norms) as the way things are and must be. At the stage of
self-authorized knowing (or fourth order of consciousness), the
individual can consistently use his or her own judgment and self-
chosen procedures as sources of decision making. This episte-
mology enables counselors to make more nuanced counseling
decisions and to show empathy, self-reflectiveness, insight, and
tolerance for ambiguity. The last of the adult stages, dialectical
knowing (or fifth order of consciousness), is supposed to be the
dominant mode in fewer than 5% of adults, and one is there-
fore unlikely to find it in students. It consists in questioning the
certainty of one’s own positions, looking for the discourses from
which one speaks, and considering alternative views. It is regarded
as a way of thinking that counselor educators themselves might
strive for, while focusing on the movement of their students to-
ward a self-authorizing order of consciousness.
Chapter 2 presents three influential theories on teaching
practices: those of John Dewey, Lawrence Kohlberg, and David
Kolb. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the guidelines for counselor educa-
tion and the phases of counselor development, and the final chap-
ter of Part 1 presents six sets of strategies for counselor education
practice: lecturing, discussion, questioning, small groups, reading
and writing, and improvisation, all of which are discussed in de-
tail and made consistent with a constructivist and developmental
approach.
Part 2 (Chapters 6–22) meets the teacher’s need for the prac-
tical, with carefully crafted guides for teaching 17 content areas,
or courses, in the counselor education curriculum. This is the
body of the handbook and relates to teaching introduction to
counseling, counseling skills, theories for the constructivist coun-
selor, and assessment and testing; also group counseling, research
methods, social and cultural issues in counseling, lifespan de-
velopment, career development, and constructivist supervision.
There are courses in practicum and internship, diagnosis and
354 Book Review

treatment planning, children and adolescent counseling, fam-

ily counseling, school counseling, community agency/mental
health counseling and crisis intervention, and substance abuse/
addictions counseling. Although written by specialists in each
field, the editors successfully and efficiently manage giving unifor-
mity to the contributions by making use of graphic aids, including
tables showing objectives, activities, and constructivist principles
pertaining to each topic; boxes furnishing samples; and appen-
dices offering various kinds of material such as scales, examples of
transcripts, case studies, checklists, instructions, and guidelines.
Part 3 (Chapters 23–25) consists of innovative ideas for coun-
selor education. Among them, I was particularly interested in
narrative-based counselor education (a proposal described as
bold in the preface of the book). Here, authors K. Crocket and
E. Kotzé describe how the metaphor of story is at the heart of
their approach at the University of Waikato at each phase of the
program. It aims to offer learning experiences that support stu-
dents in drawing together the storylines of their own lives and
the counseling practices they learn, thus creating an ethical and
epistemological resonance between the practice taught and the
pedagogy employed in teaching.
A final Part 5, written by the editors, draws conclusions and
implications, underlining the obstacles to enacting a constructive
counselor education and the possible responses to them, so as to
extend the zone of proximal development of the academy.
This is an excellent book, an out-and-out handbook, whose
utility goes beyond counselor preparation. I am sure I will find it
a source of inspiration in my activity as a teacher of psychotherapy.

Reference

American Counseling Association (2011). Resources. Retrieved from http://www.

counseling.org/resources
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