The Collaborative Team as a Training and Therapeutic Tool

Within the field of systemic family therapy, the collaborative team is emerging as a powerful training approach as well as a valuable therapeutic tool. This article presents the collaborative team as a method of counselor supervision and training. Issues around the developing team process and potential pitfalls are elaborated. Finally, examples, which serve to integrate discussion of training and clinical applications, are presented.     

Educating Counselors For Primary Prevention

Although the idea of primary prevention has become prevalent in the literature of the helping professions, actual services in this area have lagged behind. If counselors can develop the special skills needed to carry out primary prevention strategies, they may be effective in helping their clients find and maintain personal and environmental resources that they need to ward off problems. Primary prevention skills include educational skills, program development skills, and change agent skills, all of which can be learned in the context of master's level education or in-service training. Mention the words “primary prevention” in mental health circles these days and you're a hero!     

Conducting and Reporting Integrative Research Reviews: Accumulating Scientific Knowledge

Integrative research reviews are conceptualized as empirical research. Guidelines are offered to promote rigorous standards for conducting and reporting reviews in counselor education and supervision.     

The Politics of Bilingualism: A reproduction analysis of the policy of mother tongue education in Hong Kong after 1997

After the resumption of sovereignty in 1997 mother tongue education in Hong Kong, though it began with the good intention of national reintegration, politically, socially, culturally and educationally, has escalated the tensions and contradictions of the politics of bilingualism in its implementation. The government policy of bi-literacy and trilingualism addresses, rather than resolves, the problems of hegemonic struggle among different social groups in the society, and between the indigenous elite class and national ruling elites at both the local and national level. A reproduction analysis is conducted to examine the events pertinent to the language shift of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) to Chinese as a medium of instruction (CMI), with particular emphasis on controversial issues such as parental choice, antagonism of elite classes, and group politics in the face of the internationalisation of English under globalised developments of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). English, a colonising language in the past and now a world language for changes in ICT, remains problematic for Hong Kong's language policy undergoing decolonisation and internationalisation in its early post-transitional years. Putonghua, the national language of China, challenging Cantonese, the regional dialect, as the formal and high Chinese language of the society, has added complexities to the discourse of polemical mother tongue education under the 'one country, two systems' framework practised in Hong Kong.     

Personal variables affecting the perspectives of head‐teachers and teachers towards teacher participation in school decision‐making

The article reviews research which has taken place relating to the influence of certain biographical factors on head‐teacher and teacher perspectives on who should take decisions within schools. The particular biographical factors which are considered are status, sex, age, length of experience and school size. Each is examined independently and shown to have some influence though existing research does not always agree on the type or extent of this influence. The article concludes by stating that whatever this influence might be, it is only one small aspect of the complex decision‐making process.