RESEARCH PAPER
Parallel Journeys: Creating andConceptualising Learning in Language
Counselling
Fergal Bradley & Leena Karlsson, University of Helsinki Language Centre
In this paper, we explore how learning is conceptualised and created in language counselling sessions in the ALMS
(Autonomous Learning Modules) programme at Helsinki University Language Centre. In ALMS courses, learners reflect in order to plan, develop, and evaluate study programmes which fulfill their foreign-language degree
requirement. This reflection partly happens in counselling sessions, with the learners conceptualising learningand themselves as language learners, in discussion with their counsellor. One of the aims of this discussion is toafford the emergence of new learning and new learning selves. The counsellor’s experience is a parallel process:We create and recreate our counsellor selves through each counselling encounter. Moreover, in exploring thisphenomenon, we conceptualise our counsellor selves through practitioner-research and engage in the reflective
practice we ask of our learners. In our inquiry, we use free-writing after counselling sessions as a method of inquiry(Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), both to create and analyse data. The article consists of two practitioner researchaccounts in which we critically examine the free-writing through our theoretical understandings. These accounts
are framed by an introduction, responses to each other’s research, and a coda. In this project, we wanted to experiment with new forms of academic writing. For us, writing from our experience, moving between free writing
and academic text construction was a way of braiding the personal and the academic, making affective interpretations of our counselling encounters, and reconstructing ourselves textually. We believe this interactive process ofreflective writing and critical discussion has the potential to afford learning and self-discovery for both counsellors
and students.
本稿では、ヘルシンキ大学ランゲージセンターの自律的学習モジュール（ALMS）
プログラムのカウンセリングセッションにおいて、学習がどのように概念化され、創造されるのかを考察した。ALMSコースでは、学習者が、自らが履修する言語プログラムを、計画、構成、そして評価するために省察を行う。この省察の一部はカウンセリングセッションの中で行われ、学習者は、自身の学習および学習者としてのあり方
を、カウンセラーとのやり取りを通して概念化する。本稿の目的の一つは、新たな学習方法と、今までにない学習者像の提起である。カウン
セラー自身の経験も学習者のそれと平行しており、毎回のカウンセリングを通じて、自身のカウンセラー像を追求していく。さらにこの現象を深く追求する中で、われわれはカウンセラーとしてのあり方を実践研究の中で概念化し、カウンセリングセッションで学習者に課しているものと同じような省察を、自らも行うようにした。本研究はmethod of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)として、カウンセリングセ
ッションの後に行われる自由記述を用いて、データを収集し分析した。本稿は、参加者二人の実践研究から構成されており、集められた自由記述は私たちの理論的解釈に基づいて分析された。これら二つの実践研究は導入、研究参加者相互によるフィードバック、そしてまとめからなっている。本研究において、我々は新たな形の学術文書様式を試みた。我々にとって、カウンセリングでの経験を記録し、自由記述と学術文書を行き来することは、個人的な経験を学術理論に組み込む一つの方法であり、カウンセリングで直面したことを効果的に解釈し、文字を通してカウンセラーとしての自分自身を再構築する方法ともなった。このような双方向的な省察と建設的ディスカッションの機会は、
カウンセラーと学習者の双方に学習と自己の再発見を促す可能性を与えるものと思われる。

Keywords
language counselling/advising, practitioner research, reflective/ experiential writing, professional development,
learner/counsellor reflective practice

キーワード
言語カウンセリング/アドバイジング、実践研究、省察的/経験的ライティング、専門的能力の開発、学習者/カウンセラーのリフレクティブ・プラ
クティス

Language counselling, as we practice it in the ALMS (Autonomous Language Learning
Modules) programme at the University of Helsinki, involves a student and their counsellor meeting to discuss language learning It is a form of language advising, drawing
on humanistic counselling and language teaching (Carson & Mynard, 2012, p. 5) to promote

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and support learning and learner autonomy However, as ALMS counselling has emerged in
our unique context so, too, each counselling meeting differs as individual students and theircounsellors plan and reflect on learning.
In this paper, we—Leena Karlsson and Fergal Bradley, ALMS counsellors—explore our own
counselling in relation to our students’ learning processes during a semester-long ALMS
course in spring 2016 We use a cycle of free writing after our counselling sessions, and considered commentary on the resulting texts, to reflect on the role of counselling in our students’ learning journeys on their ALMS courses. We also explore our counsellor selves andhow they grow and develop during the project. In this sense, our paper describes parallel
journeys of students and counsellors in ALMS.

What is the ALMS Programme?
ALMS (Autonomous Language Learning Modules) is an English course, one of several options for students at the University of Helsinki to fulfill the required foreign-language studies component of their degrees. The students are primarily Finnish, and Finnish-speaking,undergraduate students working towards degrees in one of the university’s 12 faculties. The
course’s underlying philosophy is learner autonomy, in that, after two awareness-raisingsessions, students design, carry out and reflect upon their own programme of study in order
to complete the course (for more information see Karlsson, Kjisik, & Nordlund, 1997, 2007).
Students may attend a variety of support groups to practice and develop their language skills
and knowledge, and many also create groups of their own. However, many also choose to
do part of their work independently. The starting level for the course is nominally B2 on the
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. In practice, however, students
are often above or sometimes below this level. We ask ALMS students to consider the statedcourse objectives as a factor when planning a course that is personally relevant for them.
ALMS has few formal requirements, the primary ones being that students keep a learning
diary and come to three counselling sessions In the diary—or log, blog, or portfolio, the exact
format is not important—students record their work and reflect on it, in writing. Reflection
on language learning and language use occupies much of the awareness-raising sessions
at the beginning of the course. These two compulsory sessions are the only official groupmeetings of an ALMS course Comprising roughly 20 students, the groups are often faculty-specific, but this does not mean the students will necessarily work together or even meetagain. The aim of these sessions is to start the reflection process and to support the students
in developing a learning plan for the course. Students engage in and with various reflection
models, methods and tools, such as completing the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning(SILL) (Oxford, 1990), writing language learner histories, and free writing about and discussing previous language encounters They also learn about the practicalities and possibilities of
ALMS: sharing ideas, asking questions, reading blogs and logs donated by former students,
signing up for and creating support groups, and writing their own plans for the course The
reflection and planning—looking backwards and forwards—continues in the learning diaryand the counselling sessions

The Role of Counselling
ALMS students come to three counselling sessions throughout their course—at the beginning,in the middle, and at the end These counselling sessions are the primary contact students
have with the responsible teacher on the course (their ALMS counsellor), who also leads theawareness-raising sessions at the beginning. Taking place at different stages, the counselling
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Parallel Journeys: Creating and Conceptualising Learning in Language Counsellingsessions play different roles in a student’s course. In the first session, students look back attheir learning histories and plan their course based on this, echoing Kramsch’s (2004), “remembering how and imagining what if ” In the second counselling session, students discuss
the course in progress: their learning and the reflection on it in their diary. Finally, the third
counselling session involves looking back and evaluating their learning, and looking forward
to their future as language learners and users
In ALMS, we view counselling as a holistic process, which involves the whole person: theirstudies, their personal, and their professional lives, and their pasts, presents, and futures
Counselling is also dialogic, in that students and counsellors discuss the course plan together and the counsellor tries not to dictate or tell the student what to do on their ALMS course
Ideally, it is the learner in the leading role—taking charge of their own learning (Holec, 1981,p.3)—with the counsellor advising, empathising or challenging as needed, but above all listening and responding Counselling is also an autobiographical and experiential process
Students tell stories about themselves and their language experiences, sharing them with thecounsellor, who may share their own stories and experiences in return This sharing involves
the building of a relationship between student and counsellor, involving empathy, respect,and genuineness (Mozzon-McPherson, 2012, p. 48).

This Project: Reflective Writing and Practitioner Research
Since it began in the mid-1990s, ALMS has always been inquiry oriented, with a tradition ofpractitioner research (see, for example, Karlsson, Kjisik, & Nordlund, 1997; Karlsson, 2008;
Karlsson & Kjisik, 2011; Kidd & von Boehm, 2012). Recently, we have used methods such as
peer group mentoring (PGM) (Heikkinen, Jokinen, & Tynjälä, 2012) as a support network
and a means of professional development. The PGM meetings involve counsellors sharing
stories, free writing, and reading literature from the field of language advising. This work
has prompted further practitioner research, such as a recent project, inspired by Dörnyei
and Kubanyiova’s (2014) work on vision and motivation, where nine counsellors wrote toeach other about their visions of future counselling selves (Bradley & Karlsson et al., 2016).
This paper arises, then, from a culture of reflective writing and an attitude of inquiry (Larsen-Freeman, 2000). We wish to take up Laurel Richardson’s (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)
idea of writing as a method of inquiry but, as educators first, we also want our inquiry to be
non-invasive and integrated into the counselling pedagogy (see the principles of Exploratory
Practice, Allwright, 2003; Allwright & Hanks, 2009).
Through our PGM meetings, we became interested in how we, as counsellors, experience
our students’ reflective processes and the creation of new learning and new learning selves,as this happens in the counselling sessions We also see a parallel between our learners’
personal reflection process in ALMS and our own: through the counselling encounters andour practitioner research, we discover and create our counsellor selves, by doing the reflective practice we ask of our learners in ALMS. So for this project, we ask the question of howlearning is conceptualised and created in counselling Not expecting a single, simple answer,
we work for understanding of our own counselling and our students’ learning.
To explore the question, our first stage was free writing—pen on paper in a notebook—after our counselling sessions throughout one semester This free writing then formed the basis
for critical commentaries—typed on the computer—in which we examined and discussed ourfree writing our free writing through our theoretical understandings, interests and concerns
The process formed a cycle of immediate reflection and considered response on our counselling, which influenced one another, as we moved from first counselling to second and third
during the semester The writing, and then reading of ourselves, developed into a shared crit-96

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ical discussion of our practice as counsellors and our experiences and understandings of thestudents’ learning in their ALMS courses
Our concern in this project was with writing as an expression of autonomy. We use reflective and free writing with our students as a way of helping them to recognize and appreciate
experiential lifewide learning (see Barnett, 2010), and so it seemed an appropriate method for
us to explore our counselling practice and identity In their diaries, the students write and areshaped by their writing, as are we in our inquiry effort. Writing, at its best, acts as a “glue”
between different sites and experiences of learning. Similarly, counselling sessions encourage
students to draw together their ideas, thoughts, feelings, and experiences related to language
learning, and this is a way to stimulate new learning and help new learning selves emerge
Thus, reflective writing and counselling can both be seen as critical nodes or hotspots in theecology or complex system of ALMS for both students and counsellors They can both consolidate past learning and stimulate new learning
Through writing here in our counsellor voices, we express our autonomy, and this expression emerges from engaging with theory. The theoretical perspectives that shape our thinking, that is, learner/teacher autonomy as a rich ecology (linking elements from complexity
theory and learning ecologies, narrative autobiographical knowing, experiential learning,learning histories, and storied identities) have influenced the methodological choice for thisresearch Caring for the students’ wellbeing and quality of life and, very importantly, theirownership of learning meant looking for a way of researching that would be pedagogicallymotivated. Thus, turning our gaze upon ourselves, an auto-ethnographical take on the counselling dialogue, felt like an ethical and pedagogically sustainable solution.
In a thought-provoking article, Arthur Bochner (2012) tells the story of why and how he(together with Carolyn Ellis) came to see narrative and autoethnographic storytelling as alternatives to standard academic writing practices in social sciences He writes about what happened when they decided to think of themselves as writers, as storytellers, and turned an ethnographic eye on themselves and their own lived experiences, a process ours shares features
with. In Bochner’s text, which is both an academic article and a first-person story, we see an
instance of autoethnographic storytelling which suggests how we can write about human experience, “not as reporters but as writers ” This is also what we have tried to do in this paper

The Structure of the Paper
The paper now splits into distinct but connected texts. The first is Leena’s methodology section, “Feeling My Way” through Writing from Experience In this section, Leena focuses on writing as a method and as data in this project (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005) This is followed
by a response from Fergal The third section is Fergal’s results section, Meeting of Minds and aCounsellor’s Reaction. Here, Fergal discusses what he learned through the project and the implications for his counsellor identity Leena then responds to this Finally, the Coda, or concluding section, draws together the various strands of the process, reflecting on writing as ameans of professional development Figure 1 demonstrates the structure visually
We choose this structure to allow the reader into our different but related experiences andunderstandings and to allow our individual counsellor/researcher voices to express distinct
but connected sense-making processes in this project.

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Figure 1. The Structure of the Paper

Leena: “Feeling my way”i through Writing from Experience
I am a language counsellor and have been living and working on the landscape of ALMS stories for 20 years. Language counselling means interacting with feeling, flesh-and-blood
human beings, experiencing complexity and ambiguity, looking for, and often not finding, thewords to express the experience I am going through and to interpret the one the student istelling about My own and the students’ embodied and emotional reactions to the encountercan be challenging to make sense of in the fleeting moment of counselling interaction. Finding sensitive interpretative tools in a retrospective research effort can be even more challenging
I believe that language counselling, like teaching, should be reflective and become “an exploratory sort of research” (Vieira, 1997, p. 60). This kind of an educational inquiry should
be on-going, context-sensitive and self-reflexive; in my experience, it is also a process thatshapes my counsellor self as much as I shape my professional landscape through research I
am a practitioner who believes in pedagogy for autonomy and, as a researcher on the landscape, in always being aware of my own autobiography and its influence on my inquiry. In
my research I have been using methods that, on the one hand, serve the purpose of getting
close to lived and felt experience and, on the other hand, respect and serve the research participants. Autobiographical narratives, I find, are one powerful way of representing lived andcontext-shaped educational experiences. During my thesis writing process (Karlsson, 2008), I
came to see writing as a method of inquiry. For me, it was a way of finding out about myself
as a researcher and my research topic, a way of thinking and learning, of knowing, of discovery and analysis, and also a way of telling. Writing as inquiry (Richardson & St Pierre, 2005)
1

I borrow Sarah Ahmed’s metaphorical concept of “feel our way”—inspired by Benesch’s (2012)
work—to describe my writing process and the emotional echoes from previous research and practice98

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means using writing as both a method of data collection and data analysis, as inseparablefrom research. Thought happens in the very writing: the writer thinks, writes and creates.
I am also a facilitator of student writing and a writer of academic and professional texts
Writing as a process, experience and phenomenon puzzles and fascinates me As a writer
myself, I have experienced different ways and textual forms of writing, individual and collaborative, in academic contexts and elsewhere I learnt about writing conventions and practices
at school and university, worried about my lack of skill, experienced writer’s blocks and felt
uncertain about what to write and how to communicate my thoughts to an audience Theseexperiences have shaped my thinking and influenced the way I see the role of writing in educational and personal lives, that is, what writing can be and do, for myself and my students
In recent years, I have been involved in experimenting collaboratively with personal kindsof scholarly writing that uses the writers’ autobiographies as a basis (Barfield & Delgado,
2014; Bradley & Karlsson et al., 2016). Both writing projects have been first-hand experiences in relational writing and also meant engaging in professional development from the insidethrough pedagogical conversations, explorations, and collective authoring Jiménez Raya andVieira (2015) also suggest that we should see inquiry and writing from experience as professional development
These projects raised my interest in further experiments in how one can/should/might
write about educational experience in an academic text I became convinced that searching forcollaborative answers for these questions are ways of unlearning and relearning writing so as
to bring it closer to the self and both the intellectual and emotional aspects of lived experience The discussions with the other writers and the dialogic, multivoiced writing also became
tools for developing a “scholarship of counselling” (see Vieira 2010; 2013), that is, inquiry
into, narrating about, and disseminating our practice
In my work, there is a need and duty for counsellor reflexivity, which in turn can become
an ethical way of building a bridge between research and practice: being and becoming areflexive practitioner. When students become participants in a research effort, a researcher’s reflexivity should permeate every step in and aspect of the research process. For me,
researcher reflexivity is the capacity to acknowledge how my own experiences and contexts,
possibly fluid and changing, inform the process and outcomes of the inquiry (Etherington,
2004, pp. 31-32).
This means being aware of how my own experiences, thoughts, feelings, motivations, educational, social and personal history, my whole autobiography, inform me all the way throughthe pedagogical and research process, including the final text produced. Over the years, I have
unlearnt certain ways of thinking and stopped seeing genres of writing promoted in schools
and academia as the only legitimate ones When using autobiographical narratives to capture the experiences on the ALMS landscape, I have written what could be called “braided”(Casanave, 2003) or “interwoven” (Choi, 2016) stories of personal and academic lives. However, during this project, I was determined to learn new writing and interpretative practices(Luce-Kapler, 2004) through writing and for my own writing in the future. In particular, I
needed to work with raising the level of affective interpretation (Luce-Kapler, 2004) of whatwriting is and does in order to counsel and facilitate from my experience
For this end, I hoped to gather such data in the (free) writing, which I would not otherwise
be gathering: St. Pierre (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 970) calls this data “dream data”,“sensual data”, “emotional data”, “response data”, and “memory data” For me, her question “how can one textualize everything one thinks and senses in the course of a study” ties
in with a concern for how to write about experience, how to find the language for emotional

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reactions, how to understand and communicate what emotions do in learning (Benesch, 2012),
and how to construct knowledge yet touch upon unspoken or hidden emotional reactions.
From a previous writing project (Karlsson, 2016), I knew that combining formal and creative uses of language can provide spaces for transformative learning when “less cognitively-driven, more spontaneous and bodily-felt approaches” (Hunt, 2013, p. 15) to learningand writing are used. Free writing was a choice that I knew would open me up to the bodily
nature of writing (Hunt, 2013). How did I then write my way through this project? How did“thinking feelingly” (Hunt, 2013, p. 15) happen? Was emotional data created in the writing?
Emotions mattered and indeed guided me in and through this writing effort and every effort in our hybrid writing project: free writing after counselling, writing commentaries after“rereading myself” and engaging in writing this final text shaped me and gave a potentiallynovel insight into writing the next text Here is an extract from my free writing after the 3rd
counselling sessions:… also what was happening, sporadically, was the awareness of our bodies, connections between
them and our stories, our moment of being in the world together. My bitten nails and Minttu’s,
Ida’s tears and her tense body, slowly relaxing. Maria’s blushing face, her anxiety worse than
before and how my own shock reaction slowly melted both of us into laughter and good feelings.
Yes, I’ve felt old, feeble, almost smelly with some of these fresh and beautiful nimble bodies. And
this takes me back to auto/biography [reference to a central concept by Liz Stanley I usedin my thesis]: how complex the interrelations between partners in counselling are, the bodies
and the physical space matter here. Fergal wrote about the meeting of minds [reference toFergals’ commentary text I had read]; I became really aware of the meeting of bodies, too.
Bodies that shake, sweat and refuse to carry us to a classroom or a counselling office: anxiety is abodily experience (handwritten text, free writing 9.5.2016)
This then is an extract from a commentary text to the free writing, an example of re-reading myself and of how “thinking feelingly” continues and is woven in with the reading happening at the same time:
Fergal’s “meeting of minds” is a wonderful metaphor for many counselling encounters that succeeded and a valuable goal for the work we do! In these final counsellings, I became very awareof my body and the students’, the “meeting of bodies”, and the connection between our bodies
and our stories at the one moment of being together in the counselling room. Anxiety that I know
so well from many troubled students is a bodily experience. Embodiment (e.g., Horsdal, 2014,
Hunt, 2013), the biological bodies and how bodily processes underlie learning encounters, seems
an avenue to be explored. Horsdal writes about bodies, minds and stories in interaction in autobiographical narratives. Perhaps also considering writing as a bodily action, as a body experience, as an activity and object, in the methodology chapter? My own writing has been happening
using two techniques: 1) free writing after counselling meetings by hand (and also keeping a diary as in filling in notebook after notebook with everything that happens in life), and 2) writing
commentaries with the computer. How have these techniques affected the meanings produced?
Cixous (1993) writes about “writing as a method of embodied and emotional knowing”, which
this project has made a tangible thing (commentary mid-May 2016).
It was clear that writing across the texts acted as self-support and as a way of venting
feelings, but also as a way of getting back into being an academic writer, yet bringing some“feeling held” experiences into the final text being born. All writing seems to be “permeable”(Luce-Kapler, 2004, p. 19) and thus we import elements from other discourses we engage

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in during the time of writing; my discussions with Fergal are a case in point Writing was
non-linear and complex, it was episodic and fragmentary but it became a “glue” betweensites of learning, an ecology Embodied and emotional learning from all my interactions withthe writing environment happened

Figure 2. Leena’s Free Writing Journal
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Fergal’s Response to Leena’s Text
Leena writes about writing as a glue between sites of learning, connecting ideas, thoughts andemotions, and holding them together It is indeed a sticky object (Ahmed, 2004). Counselling,
too, for me, is a sticky object for a student on their ALMS course: it plays a symbolic role intheir learning journey and is associated with a variety of emotions. For counsellors, it is apoint of contact with students and a window into their learning, but it also represents a node
in a complex learning ecology, a potential site for an offshoot of new learning. I think, too, it
is a chance to perform and, thus, reshape our counsellor identity Leena writes about writingfrom experience, and counselling is the experience as an ALMS counsellor This is perhaps
why it is so sticky: it connects us to our students, our fellow counsellors and our reading, and
it is the experience when we fully are who we are, that is, language counsellors So writing
about counselling, in the different modes we have taken here, feels important: a way of making sense, of learning about our students and ourselves
In this response to Leena’s text, I focus on how it resonates with my own experience of the
project, which follows in the next section. Firstly, I am struck by the different directions our
texts and our sense making processes take.
As Leena mentions, in my text, I focus on meetings of minds, but Leena’s text brings upother meetings or meetings on other levels, which I had not written about or even read into
my experiences. In my text, I chose to write about patterns of encounters which jumped out
at me from my free writing and then, through another reading, about my actions and ways of
being, in relation to those patterns. But left out are other actions, encounters, patterns, andways of being We are telling stories, spinning yarns, from our experiences, but also in our
analyses. “It is through… storytelling… that humans narrate ways of knowing and being”(Lewis, 2011, p. 505).
These different departures show an ecological reality too: our projects evolving in parallel ways
to different points, just like each ALMS student’s course branches out from the opening sessions.
This suggests that inquiry is never just simply a research question, followed by data collection,
analysis and writing up the results, just as a language course is always more than setting aims
and evaluating outcomes Leena’s text brings in her reading, her previous research, her own
writing experiences, and the emotions and bodily experiences that interact in this project.
My second response to Leena’s text is an understanding of how the writing feeds back into
counselling We began this process by writing after our counselling but, by the end, the freewriting was also before counselling: the free writing and the commentary writing informed
later counselling sessions This complicates and enriches both the counselling and the freewriting, as pedagogical and research experiences We are writing from experience, but perhaps also experiencing from writing As we draw academic writing closer to the self, we also
draw ourselves closer to the writing, and our counselling practice is changed too During the
project, Leena has spoken of being “in” the counselling more because of the free writing andthe commentaries. This, too, is what we ask of our students during their ALMS courses: toreflect on and be more aware of language, how it is being used, and what they are learning.

Fergal: Meetings of Minds and a Counsellor’s Reaction
Three Types of Encounter
Unlike Leena, my history as ALMS counsellor is short—about four years. As well as counselling, I also teach, but I do not see those roles as separate; rather, they are different spaces
to work with students developing their English skills. There is slippage between the roles ofcounsellor and teacher, which brings up interesting questions about my practice and its effect102

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on student learning. This project, for me, was a chance to explore my counsellor self, but also
counselling itself as a specific learning encounter.
In my free writing, I quickly noticed several patterns emerging from my counselling. I was
writing about three types of encounter in relation to learning being conceptualised and created. My initial texts concerned the first counselling sessions, where students were talking
about their plans and goals for the course. The first type of encounter was one where students
knew what they wanted to do and learn on the course. They were able to present a clear picture of where they were going on the course, and I use this visual metaphor deliberately: it
was on my mind following a previous project on visions of future counselling selves (Bradley& Karlsson et al., 2016), inspired by Dörnyei and Kubanyiova’s (2014) work. So visual metaphors were on my mind, and indeed they appear frequently in the free writing texts The students too used visual imagery to describe their course plans For example, I have quoted one
student in my free writing as saying, “I have a picture of how the course is going to go ”
The second type of encounter was one where students were less definite about their ALMS
courses. This is not to say they had bad learning plans or didn’t know what they wanted to
do Rather, in the counselling sessions, there was more dialogue about the direction of theircourse and their plans were being co-constructed through discussion with me We were
working on a picture of their learning together. Fleshing out a sketch or focusing a camera
lens were images I used in my free writing
The third group of encounters were with students who didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t painta picture of their ALMS course in counselling I left the counselling sessions without an ideaof what they wanted to learn or what they were going to do on the course There didn’t seemto be a vision, or if there was, they weren’t revealing it to me
There were variations on these types too: when students “pictures” didn’t match up to what
they had written about in their learner histories or needs analyses, or students whose pictures I
was suspicious of or didn’t quite believe. Why were they planning to do all of this reading work,when they were telling me that speaking was what they needed? Or were they actually going to
do all of the things they had put in their plans? And would those things help them to learn?
In the second and third counselling sessions, the discussions gradually moved from planning learning to reporting and reflecting on work done and what was learned. Here again
the same three types of encounter remained. There were students who knew what they’dlearned—or when they weren’t learning!—from different activities, and students who usedthe counselling as a discussion space to make meaning out of the hours they had already put
in The third type also remained, at least in the second counselling sessions, after which I
wrote about the lack of a shared vision of learning with some students in my free writing.

Figure 3. Three Types of Encounter With Students During Counselling
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By the third and final counselling sessions, there did seem to be a meeting of minds withall of my students However, I do not imply that the course was a complete success for all
students Some students do drop out of courses and, in my four years of ALMS counselling,
I have had final counselling sessions that ended without a vision of learning shared by bothcounsellor and student The changes in encounter from one session to the next do seemto suggest that counselling works differently for students at different times of their ALMS
course The counselling encounter is not stable from one meeting to the next, but rather itchanges in accordance with a student’s learning journey. Through reflection, the student witha clear plan at the start of the course may find their ideas of what they want to learn change
during the course. Likewise, those who are not sure at the beginning may learn more about
themselves as learners and users of English as the course progresses Students bring these reflections to counselling to tell them or open them up further.
These types of encounter seem to suggest that students use the counselling sessions in different ways and for different purposes on their ALMS courses. For some, the counselling session is a checkpoint or a milestone on their course and, through preparing to report on theirlearning plans or their work in counselling, they come to understandings and make meaning
for themselves For others, the counselling session is a potential learning experience They
can discuss plans, share thoughts and get ideas for their learning The third type of encounter seemed to suggest that some students do not know what the counselling is for or how to
use it and often, in this project, it seemed also to be associated with students who had blocks
or constraints to their learning. One student recognized her problem was not with speaking,but with listening in English For another, a trip abroad and contact with an internationalgroup made her think differently about her English—she stopped holding herself up to native
speaker standards. For another, already a proficient user of English, the reflection work in
ALMS made him think differently about other languages he was learning and using.

My Role in the Encounters: Affordance or Constraint? I-poems and Negative
Knowledge
So, how was I responding to different students approaching counselling in different ways?
Was I supporting or hindering them, being an affordance or a constraint to their learning? Inmaking sense of this free writing project, I was inspired by the Listening Guide (Gilligan etal., 2003; Gilligan, 2015)—a qualitative approach to analysing data in psychology—to re-readmy free writing texts. In this method, the first listening—listening for the plot—corresponded well with what I had done with Leena I had made notes on what was happening, what
were the key themes—in my case, the three types of encounter related to individual students’
ALMS courses
The Listening Guide’s second listening involves creating I-poems: identifying instances ofthe first person singular, the I, and presenting them along with accompanying verbs and perhaps other words or phrases. Koelsch (2015, p. 98) describes the goal of I-poems as being “toforefront the participant’s sense of herself within the story” and argues that they allow for an
emotional reading of the participant’s, in this case my, lived experience I-poems also seemed
to fit well with Richardson’s (Richarson & St. Pierre, 2005) idea of creative analytical practices, which inspired this entire free writing project.
The following are some extracts from my I-poem, created from the collection of free writing texts (see Appendix A for the complete I-poem). I have chosen these because they brought
to my attention or into focus certain themes related to my counsellor words and actions in theencounters

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I need to shut up
My butting in
I think I just spouted
I felt I went on a bit
My lecturing
I came out with
I-poem extracts: My talk as redundant or even constraining
I see a frustration throughout my writing with my own talk in counselling, especially in
relation to traditional teacher talk. This regularly felt redundant or even sometimes a constraint on the counselling, not contributing to a student-generated but shared picture oflearning After one encounter of the third type, where there was no shared picture of learning
emerging, I wrote about the problem of trying to create a picture of learning for the student
This echoes Dornyei and Kubanyiova’s (2014, p. 36) comment that “the teacher can listen andprompt, but the L2 vision must ultimately become the student’s own ” The prompting comesthrough clearly in the I-poem, but with a sense of reluctance or of being used as a last resort
In the free writing, I seem to be justifying my explicitly teacher behaviour.
I found myself discussing…. describing
I felt like I needed to question
I felt I had to talk a lot
I made suggestions
I felt I had to emphasise
I-poem extracts: Having to talk / “teaching” as last resort
In one extract from the free writing, I wrote, “today, I had three counselling sessions, and I
had to be different in each one.” The I-poem also sheds light on different ways of being thatwere more positive, where my words and actions seem to afford learning.
I laid off a bit
I try to encourage
I think I asked good questions and allowed responses
I was legitimizing
I tried to open up
I was legitimizing
My letting her speak
I recognize her need to talk about thisI-poem extracts: Allowing, recognizing, validating learning
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Bondi and Fewell’s (2003) work with therapeutic counsellors—as distinct from language
counsellors—positions their knowledge as a “negative” or “inverted” knowledge, as opposedto that of say doctors or lawyers who deliver expertise or specialist knowledge to a “patient”
or “client ” This resonates with my I-poem in that, in order to positively contribute to thestudents’ learning, I seem to have to drop my “expert” language teacher knowledge as much
use it I was listening, giving space and support, responding as a language user and learnerand indeed a person, as much as a language teacher The teacher or expert role did not disappear, but waxed and waned in a dynamic relationship to other more lay, more human roles
The question “what did you learn from doing this work?” was often difficult for students toanswer, as they seemed to think I expected a technical answer—50 new words, how to use thepresent perfect, how to write an academic paper In fact, their learning was often about feelings,
attitudes, awareness, identity in relation to language learning and language use The students
who feel more comfortable speaking English now with strangers, who realize how much English
they use in their day to day life and studies and are now aware of the potential there for learning,
who see themselves applying to study abroad or writing their master’s thesis in English
In a recent paper, Kubanyiova (2016) called for language education research to shift in focus
from learner characteristics to learner sense-making. This project forced me to look awayfrom decontextualized characteristics of counsellor behaviour and instead led me into a process of making sense of my own counselling.

Leena’s Response to Fergal’s Text (and a Bit about My Own):
Making Sense of Free Writing
In a previous writing project (Karlsson, 2016) I had experienced how a writing ecology canbe created in which the very writing acts as a glue between different sites of learning whencreative and reflective ways of writing are used. In our current project I wanted to see if freewriting, done retrospectively immediately after counselling meetings, could help me to lookdeeper into, even capture, my self-experience, the emotional elements that I knew were there
but which, without documentation, mostly remained hidden or got forgotten I also wanted to
explore what emotions can do in counselling and how affective interpretations can be found,
how I can write about them and communicate them in an academic text
I take as my starting point a sentence in Fergal’s text, a text which, with its wonderful
I-poems, resonated strongly with me: “Today, I had three different counselling sessions and I
had to be different in each one.” Initially, Fergal’s words made me think about the pedagogical sensitivity a counsellor needs; a sensitivity that resembles clinical sensitivity (Lindqvist,2009), a prerequisite for a therapist’s work. A counsellor too is meeting a unique human being, engaging in a unique encounter, listening attentively and with empathy, but potentially
feeling an Otherness yet striving to make sense of it, searching for respectful and encouraging
words, and giving space for the student’s story about her learning We were both concerned
for the extent and depth of our pedagogical sensitivity and the worry was expressed in our
free writing
Like Fergal I found a way of making sense of my free writing through counselling literature, in a related and very powerful idea of the writer as the first reader of her own text,
reading and re-reading her Self. Wright and Bolton (2012, p. 26) inspired me into thinking
about free writing as re+cording (re=again and cord=heart). They describe the exploratory
and expressive process of first writing (recording as in “getting closer to the heart”), thenre-reading to the Self (which becomes a way of listening to oneself and can only happen after
the writing), and finally a deep emotional reading of one’s Self and a potential sharing with aconfidential other. Unexpectedly, the way we had planned our project and writing turned out

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to be in harmony with the idea of reflective writing as a personal questioning process (Wright& Bolton, 2012) and an integral part of professional development (Bolton, 2010) and that weboth felt the positive effects.
As a result of my self-exploratory process I became acutely aware of why we have to be,cannot perhaps even avoid being, “different in each counselling session.” This is because of
the unique bodily processes involved in the encounters, the bodies that sweat or shake, theeyes that cry or mouths that laugh In my third counselling sessions, as documented in thefree writing, emotional and bodily reactions strongly guided the counselling dialogue I now
claim that this heightened awareness came at least partly from the experience of my ongoingwriting, listening to and re-reading my Self and created, using Hunt’s words, “an increased
sense of inner space for thinking, a willingness to relax cognitive control and be open to akind of learning that comes through bodily-felt and emotional experience rather than justthrough conscious reason” (Hunt, 2013, p. 15).
During this project it became very tangible to me what Horsdal (2014) means by suggesting that bodies, minds and stories are in interaction In counselling, which I have written
about as a storytelling event (Karlsson, 2013), listening to a student’s story is just as muchan embodied, emotional experience as is reading a story, say, when an entry in a diary or alearning history is brought into counselling Writing stories is no less corporeal and emotionally charged and puts the writer in contact with her body in its environment. Ahmed (2004)
writes about sticky objects, that is, objects, ideas or words to which emotions adhere. Emotions
tend to shift and move but they also stick to a variety of objects and words in language learning and teaching situations, and, without doubt, to learning diaries and ALMS counselling itself and the very idea of what counts as learning When normalizing happens with a learning
tool, when “even students’ reflective thought becomes an oppression” (Tochon, 2015, p. x) it
can become a sticky object. Our concern should thus remain to ensure that for students, writing as inquiry or learning should mean open-ended “transgressive explorations” (Kramsch,2009, p. 205), not narrow practices bound to models, rules, rigid instructions or an overpowering concern for accuracy. The writing should ultimately be their own, just like the visionsof learning Fergal referred to in his text We should respect our students’ right to own theirdaydreaming and timetravelling (Dörnyei & Kubanyiova, 2014), using their own narrative capabilities and forming their personal visions for learning, blurred or sharp, in flux or fixed, ornone at all

Coda
In this project, we wanted to experiment and explore new forms of (academic) writing. We
wanted to use writing as method and to give it a true prominence in representing lived experience From what became an ecology of free writing, writing our commentaries, having critical reflective discussions and writing this final text, a mixture of stories emerged in which
we try to make sense of our counselling lives and, in the end, attempt to give an account inwhich we “persuade others to see our perspective” (Choi, 2016, p. 116). We wrote the texts,
this final research text included, in the first person; we made ourselves the objects of ourinquiry; we depicted experience in episodic and fragmentary forms across time; we did not
generalize across cases but tried to give concrete details of individual encounters; we presented the texts as stories with characters and storylines; we brought to light the emotional experiences in the counselling We wrote “not as reporters but as writers” (Bochner, 2012).
We now hope that our research story manages to convey to the reader the experiential
context of our counselling stories and to touch lightly upon some immediate experiences inour counselling rooms We hope that the reader can “hear” some of the emotional and emLearner Development Journal • Volume 1: Issue 1 • November 2017107

Parallel Journeys: Creating and Conceptualising Learning in Language Counsellingbodied echoes of the encounters We hope to have written in such a way that the concretenessof feelings and actions between the participants can be imagined We hope the story we havewritten resonates with our readers and even creates vicarious experiences in them (Conle,
2000). For us, writing from our experience, moving from free/reflective and creative writing
to academic text construction and back was a way of braiding the personal and the academic,
a way of making affective interpretations of our counselling encounters and a way of textual
self-reconstruction
Based on our experience, we will wholeheartedly, but with a pedagogical sensitivity, recommend free/reflective writing to our students. Moreover, we will suggest that they consider taking self-exploratory and expressive writing further through engaging in reading andre-reading themselves in their texts and through writing and experimenting with different
genres. The process of inquiry into learning, a parallel to the one described here we think,
could have them walk the bridge from experience to reflection in the texts written, listened
to and read; encountering, analyzing, and interpreting emotions, memories, learning, evensticky issues. They could move between sites of experiential lifewide learning in writing alearning diary or journal, in recording and reflecting on their learning. Such a self-createdecology of writing has the potential of becoming a way of thinking, of self-discovery, a method for emergent learning and an emotional and creative yet analytical process for students inthe same way as it was for us as counsellors

Review ProcessThis paper was open-reviewed by the following Review Network members: Jo Mynard and
Ted O’Neill (Contributors have the option of open or blind review.)

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Author Bios
Leena Karlsson is University Lecturer in English at the University of Helsinki Language Centre, Finland Her research and publications focus on language advising/counselling, learner/
teacher autonomy, learner diversity, and narrative inquiry and stories in educational settings
She coordinates the ALMS Programme at the Language Centre Pedagogy for autonomy is thedriving force in her practice. Email: leena.karlsson(a)helsinki.fi
Fergal Bradley is University Instructor in English at the University of Helsinki Language
Centre, Finland His teaching and research interests include language advising/ counselling,learner/teacher autonomy, academic writing, identity in second language learning and teaching, and practitioner research as a means of learning and professional development Email:fergal.bradley(a)helsinki.fi

Appendix A
I-poem Created from Fergal’s Free Writing
1st Counselling
Me thinking metacognitively
I’m counselling
I had

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I think
I forced him to confront
I’m not sure
I had
I ran overI found myself discussing / describing
I also foundI need to be
I had
I find it hard
I’ll go throughI don’t know
I need to shut up, recognize, encourage
I found myself
My butting in
I was reminded
I got personal
I can still feel it
Am I changed?
I’ve given myself
I had
I felt like I needed to question
My questioning
I didn’t have to confront
I laid off a bit
I still seem focused on
I had to be
I found it difficult
I don’t know
I ran into
I try to encourage

2nd counselling
I had
I think
I could see
I saw
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I saidMy discussion
I’d like to read more on(I was) negotiating myself
I was kinda chatty
I think I asked good questions and allowed responses(I was) legitimizing
I tried to open up
I think I just spouted(I was) legitimizing
I felt I went on a bit
My lecturing
I think
My letting her speak
I had
I had to be different
I felt I had to
I made suggestions
I felt I had to emphasise
I came out with
I always worry when
I think
I had to get personal
I would do ALMS
I was able to
I gave some suggestions
I was amazed

3rd counselling
I had
I thinkI’ve asked if I can quote her
I had
I get the feeling
I finished

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I will be writing again
I had
I’ve chatted
I feelI feel
I was in a hurry
I was impatient
I recognize her need to talk about thisLearner Development Journal • Volume 1: Issue 1 • November 2017113