Dr Paul Galbally & Dr Fevronia Christodoulidi, BSc (Hons) Counselling, University of East London

In our exciting new article in Teaching in Higher Education, we take a pluralistic perspective to demonstrate how academics at the University of East London—working with a diverse cohort of students in a collaborative, reflexive, and dynamic way—has led to a vibrant pedagogical culture that has resulted in better than average outcomes and an embedded reflective teaching style. We advocate and provide pragmatic recommendations for interacting with students in a way that allows a personalised pedagogy for each learner and allows them to meaningfully contribute to a shared and phenomenological learning encounter in every type of educational activity they take part in. In this blog, we will introduce the idea of pluralism within teaching; showcase our collaborative research project with a cohort of final-year BSc Counselling students; and highlight the types of practices that have contributed to a truly diverse group of learners outperforming national averages in attainment, retention, and inclusivity.

Pluralistic practice is a term that we are borrowing from the domain of psychotherapy and applying it to a higher education setting. As a teaching team of psychotherapists, counsellors, and psychologists, we naturally occupy a hybrid role of academic practitioners and in some ways have embedded the concept of pluralism in our professional lives. We wear multiple hats as practitioners, clinical and research supervisors, teachers and pastoral care tutors which we occupy carefully when interacting with students within the boundaries of our academic role. Pluralism is a branch of psychotherapy that is gathering increasing momentum and is spearheaded by several esteemed proponents including Mick Cooper, Windy Dryden, and John and Julia McLeod. The central tenet of this postmodern perspective is a worldview that accepts and values all approaches to psychotherapy in a way that opposes the traditionalist monoculturalism that some refer to as ‘purist’ forms of training. The main difference is that pluralism is accepting and appreciative of other ways of working: ways that some traditional practitioners would view as inferior, ineffective, wrong, or unscientific when compared to their chosen approach. When this philosophy is applied, the client is centralised as a valuable agentive resource and is consulted by the therapist on what they need from therapy in a collaborative dialogue that is termed metatherapeutic communication. Such pluralistic ideas translate in the context of our specific training institution in the following ways: we are teaching at the heart of East London which is a hub of cultural, ethnic, religious, and racial diversity—also reflected in our cohorts of students who embody intersectional identities in more, than usually, visible ways. As educators, we are inevitably called to adpopt a pluralistic stance when interacting with students, given that each of them presents with often different needs and therefore may need different ways of engaging with their studies and the learning community. This is quite different to other experiences we have had when teaching in non-urban and often less diverse areas in the UK when we would address cohorts where the student(s) of a minoritized background would stand out amongst their peers, with all the ensuing dynamics at play.

Within academia, forms of pluralism are argued to already exist in research paradigms such as mixed methods and can also be seen when academics cross philosophical boundaries to produce interdisciplinary research and theory. Our paper seeks to further the field of pluralism via applying this concept to our training programme. It does this by taking a pedagogical stance that incorporates a student-centred approach that personalises learning, connects biography to a lived curriculum, and offers access to intimate parts of the tutors’ experiences. This is accompanied with pastoral care that is empathetic, supportive, and tailored to the needs of the student, contextualised within their development, identity, life narrative, and educational challenges.

Our research began as a way of distilling the unique approach to training we offer, and evidencing this with the voice of the students on our course by setting up a focus group that focussed on addressing the following key questions:

1. How do we facilitate personalised learning on such a programme that considers learners’ ongoing professional identity development?
2. How do we enhance the student experience and support academic progression that is congruent to the development of a new role where the ‘use of self’ is the main tool?

Our focus group revealed that students can engage in processes of self-reflection and self-direction when facilitated by staff expertly straddling boundaries of empathy for when things go wrong alongside fostering maturity and conscience that enable the student to make appropriate ethical and professional decisions that elevate their practice, critical thinking, and interpersonal relationships.

Our focus group revealed that students—when participating in a group setting which is facilitated by staff who can expertly hold boundaries and foster empathy when conflict arises—can more easily engage in processes of self-reflection around challenging topics. This stance is supported by fostering maturity and cultivating professional conscience that enable students to make appropriate ethical and professional decisions which elevate their practice, promote critical thinking, and improve interpersonal relationships.

The whole course was for me because a kind of lesson for setting boundaries in my life. We had lots of discussions and lectures and behind the personal development groups we had personal therapy and our relationship with an academic advisor. All of them had different boundaries and showed me how I can set boundaries in my personal life with different people … And yeah, now when I reflect, I can see that it’s impacted my personal life as well.

Niloufar

The positioning of staff as the instrument of teaching was also found to help students become immersed in their learning through the human connection to their lecturers:

But, uh, I think you know the knowledge, of course was good, but definitely looking back was the human interactions. Because the knowledge made more sense through the human interactions (Abedi)

We also found that this aligned and relational mode of teaching provided a sense of containment that allowed students to engage with the course during times of personal struggle:

Who do I go to? What am I going to do? What’s the next step? How do I go about even getting help? So having that opportunity to ask it just made all the difference and that to me is the difference between someone continuing and someone dropping out.

Chantelle

As well as these anecdotal experiences provided by our students, we couched our training ethos within an empirical framework that showcased the diversity of our student body, with over a third identifying as having a minority ethnic background. We also highlighted that these students have closed the award gap of performance disparities between white and black students by reporting that all of our students massively outperformed national averages in terms of ’good’ honours awarded (1^st class and higher 2^nd class degree classifications). If we were to draw from Carl Rogers’s famous quote ‘What is most personal is most general’, these achievements are an optimistic movement towards social change in the field of psychology that provides an opportunity for increasing humility and equality within higher education.

As we conclude, we are also reflecting on the possibility of allegiance bias that can occur when researchers conduct qualitative explorations within their context; worth noting that a core principle in adopting a pluralistic stance has been remaining open to equally hear the less positive accounts from students; we facilitate that by adopting a ‘pedagogy of vulnerability’, where we may risk revealing our struggles in the interactions permeating our role and such practice has proven to model the possibilities of ‘repair’ and collaborating with students towards a shared goal to develop and succeed. In the true spirit of reflective pedagogy and pluralism, we attempt to incorporate any critique in a way that promotes students to become stakeholders of our course rather than position them as consumers of education where staff are always holding expertise. Taking this stance, we not only recentre the learning experience to the student need but also acknowledge their lived experience and retain a professional curiosity to encourage academics to become aware of and address their developmental edges. An example of this is reworking our previously undefined personal development groups around Julia Mcleod’s pluralistic model which is more structural and facilitator-led, after students struggled to understand the function of these groups. Before this change, students would often use the space to inappropriately voice concerns on course logistics or bring established, uncritical, and rigid political topics that typically resulted in a polarised debate that marginalised some student voices, avoided deep relational introspection, and left little space for meaningful development. This student-informed change has not only been well received but also led to students having a better understanding of the group purpose, greater engagement, and positive interrelational experiences following attendance.

We hope that you enjoy reading our paper as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Acknowledgements

Photo by Ricardo Resende on Unsplash