Learning Psychology and Becoming Psychologists: Developing Professional Identity through Group Experiential Learning

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the advantages of an experiential training group, specifically conceived for psychology students, in which the goal was to activate reflection on the internalized social representations of professional identity. Our study showed the results of a pre-post comparison of a one-group intervention. It was aimed to demonstrate that group experiential learning is particularly useful in changing the basis of social representations and may contribute to the construction of a realistic image of both the profession and the professional identity. The research involved 88 students enrolled in a graduate program in clinical psychology. Before and after the experiential groups, students were asked to write a text starting from the prompt ''becoming a psychologist.'' These 176 texts provided the data used for this study. We carried out a text analysis using automatized software that provided hierarchical classification and factorial analysis of correspondences. The changes in the students' representations of psychologists underline how participation in group experiential learning has allowed students to build a more realistic, less stereotypical and idealized vision of their future profession and created greater awareness of the limits of a training program based solely on the acquisition of theoretical notions. The data suggest the possibility of usefully practicing such learning activities in order to help students to reflect on their professional representations.

The professional identity of intern psychologists during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa

“…But as the year progresses, as they provide psychotherapy to their clients, as they work with their peers and supervisors and as they actively acquire and practice their skillset, they generally become competent and confident in their professional identity as psychologists (Leong and Crossman, 2015;McElhinney, 2008). After all, this collaboration with others in their field (including peers and other mental health professionals) tends to foster the development and solidification of professional identity (Falgares et al, 2017;MacQueen and Aiken, 2020). In summary, WBL provides interns with the opportunity to bridge the gap between higher education and their final career as a professional psychologist (Major, 2016).…”

Developing professional identity through group experiential learning: A Group-Analytic experiential training approach for use with postgraduate clinical psychology students

“…In our opinion, the ability to listen to others and empathize with them, and to manage relationships with users and patients, are capacities that involve selfawareness and relationship skills (Falgares, Venza, & Guarnaccia, 2017). From this point of view, the capacity to learn is more effective when the whole individual is engagedhis or her thinking, feeling, and behaviourin an intersubjective, experiential, and group training setting.…”

Counselling as a calling: Meaning in life and perceived self‐competence in counselling students

“…The practical implication of this is that younger counsellors may require help identifying meaning. This could be achieved through interventions utilising teacher feedback (Saveljeva & Rupšienė, 2016), or managing expectations of what being a counsellor will entail (Falgares et al., 2017).…”