The Health and Social Care department regularly invites industry and academic experts into their classrooms to compliment students’ curriculum learning. Recently, students had the opportunity to find out how higher level communication skills are used within counselling and psychotherapy in a fascinating workshop, delivered by Suzy Hansford of Lancashire based Edge Hill University.
Edge Hill have recently been rated Outstanding by Ofsted for their initial teacher training and have for many years been a popular destination for our health and social care students applying for courses such as midwifery, nursing and paramedic practice.
Suzy is a lecturer for their BSc Critical Approaches to Counselling and Psychotherapy degree course, having completed her PhD research on how meaning is created through language in therapeutic settings. She has also worked in therapy and was therefore able to give students an interesting perspective on the field from both an academic and a professional point of view.
As a university academic, Suzy was keen to give our students an insight into the way that university learning takes place in seminars. Our students responded positively to this and were engaged in discussions on what makes a good communicator and the aspects of good listening. While they were able to talk about many of the skills that they had learnt in their BTEC course, they were also interested to get an insight into the academic research that underpins our understanding of the importance of good listening and how this might be applied in a therapeutic setting. The non-verbal aspects of communication were highlighted in an activity in which students were asked to maintain eye contact without speaking for one minute, and consider what they focused on in the absence of verbal language. After this we discussed the barriers to good listening from both a patient and counsellors perspective and several students drew examples from their own experiences of struggling to listen in various contexts.
The session finished with a virtual tour of the beautiful Edge Hill Campus and Suzy has offered her support to any of our students wishing to apply to Edge Hill. We are very grateful to Edge Hill for facilitating this workshop and to Suzy for travelling from Liverpool to support our students.
