Parallel Journeys: Creating and Conceptualising Learning in Language Counselling

In this paper, we explore how learning is conceptualised and created in language counselling sessions in the ALMS (Autonomous Learning Modules) programme at Helsinki University Language Centre. In ALMS courses, learners reflect in order to plan, develop, and evaluate study programmes which fulfill their foreign-language degree requirement. This reflection partly happens in counselling sessions, with the learners conceptualising learning and themselves as language learners, in discussion with their counsellor. One of the aims of this discussion is to afford the emergence of new learning and new learning selves. The counsellor’s experience is a parallel process: We create and recreate our counsellor selves through each counselling encounter. Moreover, in exploring this phenomenon, we conceptualise our counsellor selves through practitioner-research and engage in the reflective practice we ask of our learners. In our inquiry, we use free-writing after counselling sessions as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), both to create and analyse data. The article consists of two practitioner research accounts in which we critically examine the free-writing through our theoretical understandings. These accounts are framed by an introduction, responses to each other’s research, and a coda. In this project, we wanted to experiment with new forms of academic writing. For us, writing from our experience, moving between free writing and academic text construction was a way of braiding the personal and the academic, making affective interpretations of our counselling encounters, and reconstructing ourselves textually. We believe this interactive process of reflective writing and critical discussion has the potential to afford learning and self-discovery for both counsellors and students.