Counselling immigrant adults at an educational institution

Maunonen-Eskelinen, I., Kaikkonen, L. and Clayton, P. (2005) Counselling immigrant adults at an educational institution. In: Launikari, M. and Puukari, S. (eds.) Multicultural Guidance and Counselling: Theoretical foundations and best practices in Europe. Institute for Educational Research and CIMO, pp. 265-286. ISBN 9513920755

Abstract

The principle of promoting free mobility of citizens has been written into European educational policies. Additionally, the philosophy of educational equality has been clearly included into the educational regulation of most European countries. Furthermore, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the ideas of lifelong learning have been defined to be the goals of improving practice within the educational systems. This means that teachers all over Europe are increasingly facing students with various ethnic backgrounds of all ages and having varied educational backgrounds, life situations and work-experiences and accordingly, being in the need of diverse educational support within educational settings. The growth in demands for equal educational rights for all inevitably strengthens the demands for the development of each teacher’s and counsellor's the skills of the teaching and counselling staff for meeting the individual needs of learners emerging from diverse reasons and counselling them accordingly. However, with this new concentration on the needs of diverse students emerging on issues like immigration, age, race, gender, special educational needs or the like, there seems to be some uncertainty with regards to what the development of these skills might mean for the practices of educational settings, their teachers and other staff and, accordingly, for teacher education training professionals for educational settings. In this article we will provide the reader with a couple of examples of how these challenges have been met within educational settings. Besides offering some examples of good practice of working with immigrant adults we also focus on the challenge of training professionals and in particular to of training teachers working with immigrant adults in educational provisions institutions. With In putting the focus on teachers we would like to underline the importance of every teacher to have having the counselling attitude and skills in his/her everyday practice with immigrant adult learners besides the work done by actual counselling professionals. However, we start our article with by addressing briefly the subject of to adult learners and some grounds of working with immigrant adult learners in educational settings. This starting point provides the conceptual framework for the practical examples to be presented. The first two of these examples are dealing deal with counselling immigrant adult students. They are followed with by examples of some learning tools used in training teachers to work with multicultural adult students.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Keywords: guidance counselling immigrants refugees universities
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Clayton, Dr Pamela
• Authors: Maunonen-Eskelinen, I., Kaikkonen, L., and Clayton, P.
• Subjects: L Education > LC Special aspects of education > LC5201 Education extension. Adult education. Continuing education; L Education > LB Theory and practice of education
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Education; College of Social Sciences > School of Education
• Publisher: Institute for Educational Research and CIMO
• ISBN: 9513920755
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2005 CIMO
• First Published: First published in Helsinki
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher