Attitudes Toward Teaching Prevention and Developmental Issues Among Turkish Counselor Educators
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Attitudes Toward Teaching Prevention and Developmental Issues Among Turkish Counselor Educators Fidan Korkut1,2
The goal of this study was to determine existing attitudes of Turkish counselor educators regarding the need to emphasize prevention and developmental issues in counselor education programs and to propose ways of incorporating these functions into the counseling area as necessary. Data were collected via questionnaire from 104 counselor educators who have been working at Turkish universities. Of the 50 professors, 23 instructors and 31 research assistants who responded, 36 had prior school counselor experience and 68 had not. The counselor educators reported they had given less attention to prevention and developmental issues in their courses than other issues, but indicated positive attitudes towards teaching preventive and developmental issues. KEY WORDS: prevention; developmental guidance; counselor educators; Turkish counselor educators; counseling programs.
In Turkey we have an idiom: “Tie your horse to a strong stake; after then, entrust God.” In the United States there are some idioms that have similar meaning, such as “You did the best you can; after then, entrust God” and “The stitch is lost unless the thread is knotted.” These idioms are very meaningful. If you do something to prevent undesirable events, you need not suffer. But you need to know how to prevent. These ideas can be translated into physical, social and psychological areas. If you do not want to have specific problems in these areas, you also can do something to prevent them. Four general approaches to guidance and counseling can be identified. These are crisis, remedial, preventive, and developmental, although it may sometimes 1 Hacettepe
University, Ankara, Turkey. should be directed to Fidan Korkut, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Hacettepe Universitesi, Egitim Fakultesi, PDR Anabilim Dali, Beytepe, Ankara, 06532, Turkey; e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected].
2 Correspondence
111 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 0165-0653/05/0300-0111/0
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appear that these four approaches overlap one another (Myrick, 1993). Atkinson (2002) claimed that, for the counseling profession, studying prevention and normal developmental issues are basic themes. According to Baker (2000), the goal of prevention is to enhance individual development. Developmental activities are part of primary prevention programs, and primary prevention reduces developmental problems (Dinkmeyer & Carlson, 2001). Prevention and developmental approaches overlap and support each other. Since these two concepts are interwoven and often referred together, prevention is used, in this paper, as a cover term including developmental approach as well. In the counseling profession, the concept of prevention has been borrowed from public health. More specifically, the concepts of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention put forth by Caplan (1964) to define prevention in the psychiatric field have been widely used for nearly four decades.
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