Encouraging phenomenological consciousness in student educational psychologists by using embodied career-focused genograms

Abstract

Background: Student educational psychologists must learn to navigate the unfathomable depths of human experience with nuanced insight. However, a diagnostic checklist approach is increasingly dominating psychological practice, emphasising biomedical symptoms and subsequent pharmacological treatment above deeper psychological insight. A phenomenological approach to experience may serve as a buffer against the reductionist medicalisation of ordinary lifeworld matters. The genogram’s inherently embodied character renders it an appropriate teaching tool for developing phenomenological consciousness.

Objectives: This article is a self-reflective narrative on how I propose using the career-focused genogram to increase phenomenological consciousness among student educational psychologists.

Methods: This exploratory investigation used a self-reflective narrative research approach to understand the career-focused genogram as a pedagogical strategy to encourage phenomenological consciousness among student educational psychologists. Reflective teaching journal entries and teaching notes serve as the foundation for this investigation.

Results: My teaching experiences using a Deweyan framework of analysis revealed three major themes: the genogram as a metaphorical function of the phenomenological orientation; the career-focused genogram as an integrated life-career ecology; and the self-constructed career-focused genogram as an embodied engagement activity.

Conclusion: The career-focused genogram as an enactment of the phenomenological condition of embeddedness can be used to promote a pluralistic psychology education that values both scientific and philosophically orientated approaches towards understanding and appreciating the depth and nuance of matters related to the lifeworld.

Contribution: This article offers a contextual perspective to existing literature on the importance of a philosophically orientated educational psychology curriculum as an alternative to a technicist diagnose-and-treat curriculum.