Counselor Development as The Hero’s Journey: Reflections from a Counselor Educator

The use of the monomyth to shape the narratives of fiction with deep meanings, while feeling both new and recognizable, is consistently experienced across all cultures throughout time. As past publications have utilized this approach to subconscious symbolism to explain many experiences, it has not yet been utilized to explain the process of counselor development. The structures utilized in this exploration of the Hero’s Journey concept include the seminal work Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949) being applied to the structure of counseling development as reviewed by Rønnestad and Skovholt (2003). Each stage of the journey will be translated into an understanding of how students grow from before their master’s program through their senior years as experts in the counseling field. The following article will engage this metaphor to explore the narrative of a counseling student on their quest to become a counseling professional through use of the stages from the monomyth as used to describe the Hero’s Journey.

Bibliotherapy for Emotional Literacy

One way to help teens manage their emotions is by using emotional literacy. Emotional literacy is a person's ability to understand, express emotions to people, respond to the expression of the feelings of others, and take responsibility for their actions. Emotional literacy can be done through pedagogical strategies, as well as the use of the application of theory and various other learning strategies. Counselors need a method to develop emotional literacy skills in students either by media bibliotherapy or better known as biblikonseling. In this case, the counselor gave the book or story. The utilization of the book as a medium of therapy is called bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy is psychotherapeutic support through reading material to help someone who is experiencing personal problems. This treatment method is highly recommended, especially for patients who are challenging to express issues verbally. The subjects were students' Universitas Kanjuruhan Malang Department Guidance and Counseling in 2015, 2016. The reason for choosing Guidance and Counseling Student Universitas Kanjuruhan Malang, as guidance and counseling student, is a candidate for school counselors, and they are required to have a good personality and need to be developed early on. This study aims to determine the effectiveness of bibliotherapy techniques to improve the skills of emotional literacy student guidance and counseling Universitas Kanjuruhan Malang. The method used in this study is the technique of pre-experimental design with one group pretest-posttest design. This design is a design study to test the effectiveness of a treatment on an individual basis.