Il counseling educativo

The research aims at exploring the counseling profession in its educational dimension, trying to understand its features and the role of counselor in an educational context such as school. The thesis consists of both a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical section is based on a deep literature analysis, highlighting the critical questions that need to be addressed in order to prove that counseling can be a profession, with a complex conceptual frame, and an autonomous practice, capable of reaching wide sectors of the population in ways that differ from those typical of psychotherapy. The deepening of such critical matters enabled the development of the theoretical part, framed by the following points: a) analysis of definitions: this step led to the identification of conceptual units allowing to outline some guidelines, in order to gain desirable shared terminology and transparency regarding meanings (Di Fabio e Sirigatti, 2005; Locke, Myers, Herr, 2001); b) presentation of counseling approaches: the first step to build an operative counseling model is to choose an appropriate framework (Amenta, 1999). The approaches presented are the psychological ones most cited in literature, and the philosophical approach considered as an alternative framework; c) the difference between counseling and psychotherapy: this is a key issue in order to define areas of intervention and application of both professions; d) features of educational counseling: the literature analysis highlighted aspects and key issues typical of the educational dimension of counseling. The need for theory to be confronted with practice led to the development of the empirical part, as a consequence of the open questions emerged from the theoretical analysis. The research questions are the following: “What is the role of counselor in an educational context such as school?” and “What are the educational aspects of counseling?”. The empirical section presents a qualitative research conducted in different U.S. schools. The research project is a collective case study (Merriam, 2001) which involves 8 U.S. schools (2 elementary, 2 middle, 4 high) and 13 school counselors. The research instruments are qualitative and include observations of school counselors in action, in order to gain an in-depth knowledge of this theme; interviews focused on some broad topics with school counselors, students and other school staff; analysis of formal and informal documents used and written by school counselors. The method of data analysis is qualitative and is based on the grounded theory process (open coding), which requires to label the significant units of the text, group the labels and find a category for each group, and group the categories in some high-order categories (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The data analysis is developed, first, on a descriptive level, aiming at providing rigorous descriptions of the phenomenon investigated, and then on a hermeneutical level. The research findings show what defines the role of a school counselor and which aspects characterize the educational dimension of counseling. In conclusion, the theoretical and empirical elaboration highlights some open questions and provides suggestions for further research.