Abstract
We use discourse analysis to examine a group supervision meeting in which graduate students who are training to become school counselors discuss counseling experiences that they had at local high schools. Focusing on metadiscourse, or talk about talk, we integrate Ochs’ concepts of epistemic stance and affective stance and Tannen’s discussion of linguistic strategies as ambiguous and polysemous in terms of power and solidarity in order to demonstrate how counselors-in-training construct their identities as what Woodside et al. call ‘boundary-dwellers’ in their professional community of practice. Examination of metadiscourse regarding address terms and the speech act of asking questions – and in particular highlighting how participants use negatively valenced affect words, the verb feel, and what Tannen calls ‘constructed dialogue’ – reveals their stances of uncertainty and discomfort, their transitional professional identities as entailing an uneasy navigation of relationships, and their recognition of the pivotal role of language in the process.
Keywords
Introduction
For counselors – and arguably for those in other ‘helping professions’ such as teaching and social work – professional identity development is an iterative and continually unfolding process, a metaphorical life-long journey (Rønnestad and Skovholt, 2003; see also Reiman, 1999). Rønnestad and Skovholt (2003) suggest that professional identity development involves not only relatively distinct phases, such as ‘beginning student’ and ‘novice professional’, but also ‘repeated cycles’ within and across phases – ebbs and flows of anxiety, enthusiasm, learning, and so on (see also Rønnestad, 1985). In addition, professional identity evolves moment-by-moment in individual social interactions; for instance, Vásquez (2007) shows how novice language teachers, in post-teaching observation meetings with their mentors, tell narratives that construct their developing professional identities, and how mentors’ contributions shape how the novices present themselves and their experiences. An individual’s professional identity development journey, thus, is not taken alone: expert scaffolding – provided by supervisors, professors, mentors, and other experts – plays a key role in the training of physicians (e.g. Erickson, 1999), psychologists (e.g. Stoltenberg, 2005), teachers (e.g. Burdelski, 2004), speech pathologists (e.g. Ferguson, 2010), and, most relevant for our purposes, counselors (e.g. Rønnestad and Skovholt, 2003). Following McAuliffe and Lovell (2006: 314), it is supervisors’ ‘ethical imperative’ to facilitate counselors’ development; however, peers also play a role in the process. Yeh et al. (2008), for instance, find that professional identity development is a key topic of discussion in online peer supervision for counselors-in-training, a context wherein relative novices provide guidance and support to each other.
Becoming an expert practitioner in one’s field also involves communicating beyond supervisory and peer relationships; it entails participating appropriately in interactions with others who take part in the professional ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Thus, Woodside et al. (2009) suggest that school counselors-in-training who are undertaking internships struggle at times as they learn to engage meaningfully with the community’s members, including teachers, students, the school’s full-time counselors, and parents; they view themselves as ‘boundary-dwellers’. We investigate the language of this boundary-dwelling experience.
Despite the existence of a scholarly understanding of professional identity development as dynamic and interactive, and as involving ongoing communication with others in supervisory, peer, and practice-based contexts, to date we know little about how specific linguistic features are mobilized in unfolding interaction to aid in professional identity creation and negotiation. Accordingly, our research aims to contribute to understanding language as a vehicle for, and interwoven with, professional identity development. Using discourse analysis, we investigate professional identity development as involving not only a sequence of somewhat discrete transitional moments or phases (which may be iterative, as noted by Rønnestad and Skovholt, 2003), but also as a process achieved moment-by-moment through language use. Specifically, we explore how identities that fall somewhere between ‘novice learner’ and ‘expert practitioner’ are linguistically constructed and managed in the context of face-to-face group supervision.
Group supervision provides the opportunity for a cohort of future counselors to collaboratively discuss and reflect upon various aspects of their training and practical experiences, with the assistance of one or more supervisors who are experts in the field. While widely identified as a key site for professional identity development by scholars in education and counseling (e.g. Auxier et al., 2003), supervision has only recently been explored using discourse analysis, such as in our previous studies of individual supervision that was conducted over email (see e.g. Gordon and Luke, 2013; Luke and Gordon, 2012) and Chiang’s (2009) study of doctoral dissertation supervision. The case-study analysis we present here considers a single face-to-face supervision session that occurred at the conclusion of a Master’s-level counseling class for school counselors-in-training. It focuses on talk about the initial or ‘practice’ group counseling sessions that the counselors-in-training conducted with local high school students and shows how the counselors-in-training construct their limited knowledge and uncertain relationships with other members of a school counselor’s community of practice, thereby creating and displaying their transitional identities. Specifically, we investigate metadiscourse, or talk about talk, regarding two linguistic devices – address terms and the speech act of asking questions. Using negatively valenced affect words, the verb feel, and reported speech or ‘constructed dialogue’ (Tannen, 2007) as they produce metadiscourse, the counselors-in-training take up what Ochs (1993) calls epistemic and affective stances; these stances display relative lack of knowledge and construct ambiguous relationships with others in the community of practice, in particular regarding the intertwined relational dimensions of power and solidarity (as these have been discussed by Tannen, 1994).
In what follows, we first introduce the notion of community of practice and the place of the novices whose discourse we consider. Second, we outline the theoretical underpinnings of our work in the areas of metadiscourse, power and solidarity, and stance. Third, we introduce group supervision as an activity and the particulars of our data. Our analysis focuses on key examples of talk about address terms and about asking questions; it is followed by our concluding remarks regarding language and professional identity development, especially the theoretical and practical importance of metadiscourse in the process.
Boundary-dwellers in a community of practice
Woodside et al. (2009) suggest that Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of ‘community of practice’ is useful for understanding the experiences of counselors-in-training. According to Lave and Wenger (1991), a community of practice is not simply a collection of people, but rather a web of participants mutually engaged in a shared enterprise. Wenger (1998) purports that three work engagement capacities are necessary to transition to full-fledged member of a community of practice, including (a) a participant’s ‘ability to interact with other members of the community’; (b) his or her development of ‘a shared repertoire of resources for negotiating meaning’, including words, concepts, and ways of doing things; and (c) a sense of ‘accountability to the joint enterprise of the practice’ (Woodside et al., 2009: 21–22). In a school counselor’s community of practice, members include the school’s students, its faculty and staff (teachers, administrators, professional counselors, etc.), and parents. Lave and Wenger (1991) observe that communities of practice also involve people who perceive themselves to be (and are treated as) ‘peripheral participants’. In this spirit, Woodside et al. (2009) refer to school counseling interns (who are placed in schools to gain training experience) as ‘boundary-dwellers’. We find that counselors-in-training, even in the pre-internship phase, are also boundary-dwellers; indeed, this understanding elucidates their language use.
One challenge counselors-in-training face as boundary-dwellers is their relatively limited access to what Wenger (1998) calls ‘regimes of competence’ – they have neither the knowledge nor skills of the community’s full members. Using strategies introduced by Reiman (1999), supervisors can help bridge this gap and scaffold the professional identity development of counselors-in-training. A key area of limited competence for many novices is appropriate social engagement (Woodside et al., 2009: 22): because relationships are built through interaction, counselors-in-training need to use their field experience time to interact with others, establishing their place in the community and building professional relationships as well as, ultimately, a professional identity. Our analysis will demonstrate how language choices – and communication about language choices – play into professional identity creation for boundary-dwellers.
Language, metadiscourse, and the creation of relationships and identities
While discourse analysts study communication of various types and about various topics, there is an increased interest in examining ‘metadiscourse’ – communication about communication, or talk about talk. 1 Broadly, and in the spirit of Bakhtin’s (1981) theorizing on dialogue, Martínez Guillem (2009: 742) suggests that metadiscourse allows speakers to ‘invoke knowledge about both the ongoing interaction and other past or future communicative events’, including by (re)framing an issue as contextually (in)appropriate, (re)defining participants’ categorizations, quoting others, and referencing similar prior events. Related, in studies of written discourse, the term has been used to refer to the various ways writers organize texts and signal how readers should orient to them (e.g. Hyland, 2010).
As Craig (2005) notes, interest in metadiscourse may stem from a cultural ‘preoccupation with communication’ and ‘the pervasiveness of metadiscourse’ in various kinds of social interaction (p. 659). For instance, Carbaugh (1988) suggests that a notable component of ‘talking American’ is talk about talk, and Schiffrin (1980) notes that therapy sessions often focus on talk. Our research highlights metadiscourse as a prominent feature of supervisory communication as well.
Scholarly considerations of metadiscourse uncover assumptions about communication; its investigation also has the potential to improve human interaction (Craig, 2005). Thus, it is productive for discourse analysts to investigate not only how interlocutors use X (where ‘X’ refers to some discursive feature or strategy, such as ‘asking questions’ or ‘reciprocally using first names’), but also how they talk about the use of X. For example, Leighter and Black’s (2010) examination of a public meeting about water conservation illuminates not only participants’ different uses of questions, but also their metadiscourse about a particular kind of question-asking – ‘raising a question’. The authors find that labeling a stretch of talk as ‘raising a question’ establishes an issue as meriting further discussion; it also serves as a means of supporting one’s position in the unfolding argument (Leighter and Black, 2010: 558, 565). In a similar vein, Buttny (2010) shows how metadiscursive comments – such as noting that a question was asked but not answered – are used in a public hearing about a zoning change to organize the verbal actions of the speech event; they are also frequently produced to point out problematic verbal actions of others. Likewise, Martínez Guillem (2009) finds that metadiscourse plays a key role in accomplishing argumentation in parliamentary discourse.
The linguistic strategies identified in these studies, such as asking questions and quoting, like all linguistic strategies, contribute to structuring talk as well as interpersonal relationships. However, the link between a given strategy and its relational intention and/or effect is not a straightforward one: as Tannen (1994) argues, while linguistic strategies negotiate the relational dimensions of power and solidarity, they are ambiguous and polysemous regarding these dimensions. Thus, she suggests that a strategy that sometimes may be seen to dominate a conversation and therefore exert power – such as topic-raising via question-asking – might instead or also be viewed as creating connection. For instance, Tannen (1994: 39–40) observes that a participant may raise and pursue topics that focus on the other person as a way of being friendly. Furthermore, topics must not only be raised (which could be viewed as a move of or for power), but also be collaboratively picked up (which also entails connection). Likewise, a strategy that perhaps aims to create connection, such as expressing concern for another, may also be used to establish (or be perceived as establishing) power (in the sense of ‘I know more than you’ or ‘I’m okay; you’re not’). Thus, following Tannen (1994), linguistic strategies can ‘mean’ power or solidarity (and are thus ambiguous) or can ‘mean’ both (and are thus polysemous).
Linguistic strategies that create and negotiate power and solidarity also construct for interlocutors what Ochs (1993) calls affective and epistemic stances. Thus, speakers create alignments toward what they are saying in terms of emotion and attitudes (or affective stances) and certainty and knowledge (or epistemic stances). Stance construction plays a key role in relationship and identity construction (see e.g. Bucholtz and Hall, 2005; Ochs, 1993; Ochs and Capps, 2001); Vásquez (2007), for instance, demonstrates how novice language teachers narrate their teaching experiences by constructing uncertain ‘moral stances’ (Ochs and Capps, 2001) that the novices and their mentors interactionally negotiate. We use an example from Leighter and Black’s (2010) public meeting data to further demonstrate how stance creation, expertise, and identities are intertwined: when a citizen at a meeting, Jim, prefaces a factual question to Tim (an expert on the panel) by saying ‘I have a question since I’m not really familiar with the [topic]’, this creates, quite explicitly, Jim’s epistemic stance of lack of knowledge and reinforces his layperson (rather than expert) identity in the encounter (p. 553). Following Tannen (1994), we might also observe that Jim’s question could simultaneously create a connection with Tim – he is displaying interest in Tim’s area of expertise.
The frameworks of metadiscourse, the ambiguity and polysemy of linguistic strategies in terms of power and solidarity, and stance are embedded within a larger understanding of human identities and relationships as constructed through everyday language use, such as the ‘sociocultural linguistic approach’ articulated by Bucholtz and Hall (2005). Bringing this back to a community of practice framework, we are reminded that community members interact collaboratively in a joint enterprise and that school counselors-in-training, as novices, typically struggle with social engagement, as our analysis will highlight.
Supervision
Our full dataset consists of a series of three group supervision meetings that were video-recorded with informed consent as part of a semester-long graduate course taught by the second author. Each meeting was 70 minutes long, but the recorder malfunctioned during the second meeting after 10 minutes of recording, resulting in 2.5 hours of recorded supervisory interaction total. Video-recording of classroom activities, such as group supervision, is common practice in many graduate counselor education programs, including at the university in the US northeast where we collected our data. The purpose of the recording was twofold: to serve as a training record of the supervisory interaction and to assist individual students and the supervisor in their ability to identify areas of strength and those in need of further attention in subsequent individual supervision sessions. The recording was completed with one camera, so only about half of the participants are visible; all are audible. Our analysis thus focuses on language.
‘Group supervision’ is a required aspect of counselor education. It offers opportunities for counselors-in-training to ‘process’ or reflect upon various experiences they have had. It gives them broader exposure to a range of client presentations than does individual supervision (which is also required), and it allows them to interact with one another and clarify and refine their understandings, as well as develop new skills. In this case, counselors-in-training who are very early in their careers – they have not yet served in formal internships – reflect upon counseling sessions they conducted, as part of an abbreviated field experience within their course, with students at local high schools regarding college and career readiness.
Participants are 11 graduate students, all of whom are women (which is not unusual in the field) and are training to become school counselors (a position formerly called ‘guidance counselor’). They sit in an uneven circle in the classroom. The instructor/primary supervisor is the second author; at the time of recording, she had 10 years of supervising experience and had been a practicing school counselor for 15 years, during which time she facilitated countless career and college readiness classroom groups. Also present and an active participant is a male teaching assistant (TA), who was then an advanced PhD student in counseling (in his fifth year). While he had 15 years of experience as a school counselor, he had only one prior experience as an instructor of group supervision.
Our primary interest in these data is how the transitional or ‘boundary-dweller’ identities of counselors-in-training are discursively created and managed. Our consideration of the dataset as a whole identified metadiscourse as a key site where transitional identities are realized, grappled with, and worked through. Through talking about talk, counselors-in-training construct their relative lack of competence in interacting with community-of-practice members and their uncertain professional relationships. In what follows, we analyze extracts of two quite active discussions characterized by metadiscourse. These occur in the final supervision meeting, as the group reflects back on the semester’s experiences; specifically, the participants talk about address terms and the speech act of asking questions. In their talk – and especially by using affect words that are negatively valenced, the verb feel, and quotation of themselves and others in the community of practice – counselors-in-training, with the input of the supervisor and TA, portray epistemic stances of lack of knowledge, affective stances of discomfort, and ultimately ambiguous relationships with others in the community of practice, especially around the dimensions of power and solidarity. They also use language to reflect on these stances and their identity implications. As one counselor-in-training remarks during the supervision meeting, while she was at the high school she wondered to herself whether she was ‘a college student giving a presentation’ or ‘a school counselor’.
Analysis: Metadiscourse and creating transitional professional identities
Address terms
Previous research, such as by Tannen (1986) and Tracy and Robles (2013), highlights address terms as a primary means of creating and displaying relationships – in other words, the ways in which participants in interaction address one another matter. This is particularly prominent in languages that have multiple forms of ‘you’ – the French tu/vous distinction, for instance (see Brown and Gilman, 1960) – but applies in English as well regarding the choice to use a first name or a title plus last name (among other options; see Tannen, 1986: 93–96 and Tracy and Robles, 2013: 58–67 for useful discussions). In most cases, a first name indicates more informality and closeness than does title plus last name when reciprocal – but unequal power when not. However, there is ambiguity and polysemy present: as Tannen (1986: 93) points out, calling someone by their first name can be interpreted as a sign of friendliness or as a lack of respect.
In our data, the extended metadiscourse about address terms unfolded as follows. One counselor-in-training, Kim, introduces the topic as part of a larger discussion initiated by the supervisor’s question of how, looking back on the semester, the school counselors-in-training could have improved their experience. In other words, knowing what they know now, what might they have done differently? As shown in extract 1a, Kim begins her comments by stating that what she mentions will be trivial; in fact, however, her remarks generate an active discussion among members of the class. She explains that while she started by having the high school students call her Kim, she retrospectively wishes she would have asked them to address her using title plus last name (Ms. Adams):
2
(1a) 1 Kim: This is a very SMALL thing, 2 but <chuckling> um,> 3 I think I would’ve started out by going by Ms. Adams, 4 Supervisor: [Mhm.] 5 Kim: [instead] of Kim in the beginning, 6 Supervisor: Mhm. 7 Kim: because um it was like not until my final time, 8 when I was talking with uh one of the counselors, 9 Supervisor: Mhm. 10 Kim: there was just something about her that kind of said, 11 I feel like the rules are a little different (with this woman,) 12 so I asked her, 13 you know, 14 ‘how would you prefer they address us’, 15 and (she said,) 16 ‘I’d prefer they address you by your last name instead’. 17 Supervisor: Mhm.
In her talk, Kim highlights address terms (although she does not use that particular label), and in particular the choice to use a first name versus title plus last name. She also represents a past conversation with one of the school’s professional school counselors using quotation, or what Tannen (2007) calls ‘constructed dialogue’, in order to emphasize the creative element in recontextualizing prior speech: Kim, using the verb feel to indicate her sensing that the counselor was being treated differently by the students, constructs an utterance in which she asks about her preferences regarding how the students address the interns. The expert counselor, also through constructed dialogue, is reported to have indicated last names as an alternative to Kim’s initial choice of first name.
Kim continues by talking about how being addressed by title plus last name changed her experience at the high school by making it easier; it changed how she felt in her role:
(1b) 18 Kim: Once I you know went from being Kim to Ms. Adams? 19 Supervisor: Mhm. 20 Kim: It was so much easier. 21 Supervisor: YOU felt different. 22 Kim: I felt different! 23 Supervisor: Mhm. 24 Kim: I felt very different, 25 I felt like I had you know → 26 <quickly> a purpose there.> 27 Supervisor: Mhm.
With the supervisor’s input and scaffolding, Kim links ease of experience to a different kind of professional feeling. She also explains her improved experience by recognition of a purpose – in other words, the name change seems to have made her not only feel different, but also more like a professional counselor, in a hierarchical relationship with students, and with a particular goal vis-a-vis them. In other words, the use of her last name leads to a reduction in uncertainty regarding Kim’s role.
As the interaction continues, the supervisor opens the floor to other participants. (She retrospectively reported that she was trying to get at the issue of solidarity implications for first-name address – suggesting indirectly that Kim and others perhaps chose to emphasize their ‘student’ identities, rather than professional identities, by asking the high school students to address them by their first names.) There are two extended responses. One counselor-in-training, Emma, constructs uncertainty and ambiguity in mentioning that she talked (conferenced) with Karen, another member of the class, about this very issue. (When Emma mentions her ‘second and third graders’ in the extract, she is referring to students she was working with as part of her part-time employment in an after-school program.)
(1c) 28 Supervisor: What do you think YOUR, 29 if this fits for you, 30 your desire to be called by your first name might- 31 might have been about for . you, 32 for those of you who . introduced yourself that way. 33 Uh huh? 34 Emma: I remember like Karen and I → 35 kind of like conferenced about this (issue?), 36 and (I was like) ‘what do you want- want them to call you, 37 what are we going to do’. 38 My third - second and third graders, 39 I had them call me Ms. Roman, 40 but going in, ((into the high school)) 41 I felt like . I was . → 42 like a college student giving a presentation, 43 so I was like not in a ‘teacher’ role [necessarily,] 44 Supervisor: [Mhm.] 45 Emma: so I was kind of confused → 46 about what I would want them to call me,
In stating that she and another counselor-in-training, Karen, kind of like conferenced (lines 34 and 35) about what the high school students should call them, Emma, like Kim, highlights the importance of address terms as a means of constructing and representing relationships in the community of practice. She also constructs for herself (and seemingly for Karen as well) a particular epistemic stance – a lack of knowledge: neither knew which address term to choose, and they had to discuss it. Using constructed dialogue in lines 36 and 37, Emma animates questions she reportedly used to initiate this discussion with Karen (‘what do you want - want them to call you, what are we going to do.’). Emma links the need for this discussion to uncertainty regarding how she perceived her role: she felt like she was like a college student giving a presentation (lines 41 and 42) and not necessarily in a ‘teacher’ role (line 43). Emma captures her feelings using the negatively valenced affect term confused (line 45), which seems to pertain to both address terms and the professional relationship.
Emma continues by recalling how she first interacted with the high school students:
(1d) 47 Emma: and I remember — 48 I don’t even — 49 I think I introduced myself, 50 like using my full name, 51 Supervisor: [Mhm.] 52 Emma: [and then] from that point on, 53 the students never called me by it, 54 they just called me ‘Miss’. 55 Supervisor: [Mhm.] 56 Others: [((‘yeah’ and other agreements))] 57 Emma: So like that was okay with me, 58 but I remember feeling anxiety around it, 59 and then it ended up, 60 like they didn’t really call me . anything,
The observation that the students initially called her ‘Miss’ resonates with others in the class, who produce verbal agreements (line 56). The end result of Emma’s unclear choice of address terms, however, is that they [the students] didn’t really call [her] anything (line 60). Schiffrin (1996) notes a similar situation in her sociolinguistic interview data: a woman reports that her daughter-in-law calls her ‘nothing’, because she was neither comfortable with ‘Mom’ nor with using the woman’s first name. Schiffrin (1996) remarks that the use of ‘nothing’ implies ‘an uncertain, unfamiliar relationship’ (p. 185). That description fits well with the situation Emma describes; in fact, she takes up an anxious affective stance vis-a-vis the situation (line 58) through use of the verb feel and a negatively valenced emotion word: she was feeling anxiety around it.
Emma finishes her remarks by expanding on her uncertainty:
(1e) 61 Emma: So . I don’t know, 62 but it was like an awkward kind of thing, 63 like . am I a college student giving a presentation? 64 [Am I:] there and I’m . a school counselor and — ? 65 Supervisor: [Mhm.]
Emma’s concluding observations link metadiscourse about address terms to professional identity development. Address terms represent, and perhaps in some sense also underlie, the uncertain nature of her ‘boundary-dwelling’ identity: the address term experience was an awkward kind of thing, and she is further not certain whether she shares an aspect of identity with the high school students and is a relative equal (and is thus more of a college student giving a presentation, line 63) or whether she is in a more hierarchical relationship with them as a school counselor (line 64).
In summary, throughout this portion of the supervisory conversation, several of the counselors-in-training construct uncertain relationships with students, key members of a school counselor’s community of practice, along the dimensions of power and solidarity through metadiscourse. This construction is demonstrated through our analysis of Kim and Emma’s discourse: in producing metadiscourse, they use constructed dialogue to represent prior conversations, as well as the verb feel coupled with negatively valenced affect words, to construct and display affective and epistemic stances. Thus, analysis of their talk about address term choice in field experience reveals their uncertainty and lack of knowledge regarding not only address terms, but also professional relationships. This kind of metadiscourse contributes to the construction of the transitional, boundary-dwelling identities of these counselors-in-training.
Speech act of asking questions
A second occurrence of metadiscourse was also prominent in the group supervisory discussion: communication about the speech act of asking questions. The notion of ‘speech act’ captures that interlocutors use language to do things in the world (cf. Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). As Tracy and Robles (2013) point out, Austin ‘suggested that there are as many speech acts as there are verbs in a language’ (p. 78). While there are multiple occasions across the three group supervision sessions where different speech acts come into focus – such as using directives to attempt to influence the high school students’ behaviors and explanations to provide information to them – asking questions received the most attention. In particular, through metadiscourse, counselors-in-training discussed their own information-seeking behaviors vis-a-vis experts in the school’s community of practice (permanent counselors, teachers, and so on), rather than those of the high school students. One example of a depiction of question-asking appeared in excerpt (1a), where Kim reported having asked a counselor about address terms; another appeared in (1c), where Emma depicted herself questioning a peer about the same issue. The counselors-in-training also produce talk that constructs their affective stances about asking questions.
As novices, counselors-in-training have limited knowledge. Ideally (and in accordance with ethics of practice), they should ask questions at their field sites, which their supervisor in fact makes clear multiple times across the groups’ meetings: no counselor can know everything, and being a professional means being aware of what you don’t know and where to find answers, and being proactive about doing so. As she explains,
(2a) 1 Supervisor: um when you get a job as a school counselor, 2 no one is going to expect you to know everything, 3 but you WILL be expected as a professional, 4 to know HOW to get the answers.
As the interaction goes on (in 27 lines not shown here), the supervisor explains that no matter how rigorous a counselor’s training is, she or he can never know everything. This means a professional counselor needs to know how to get questions answered, as described in 2b. (The ‘director of guidance’ mentioned by the supervisor in the extract refers to the head school counselor, a senior counselor on site who often evaluates the other counselors.)
(2b) 32 Supervisor: so you HAVE TO figure out how to access information, 33 what you need to know, 34 and how to ask for help from people who are at places, 35 and people where that’s safe . to do. 36 And that might not always be to your director of guidance, 37 <smile voice> every time you have a question, 38 fifty-two times a day,> 39 but- but there are other ways,
The supervisor’s words here mark the difficulty of asking questions and the ambiguity and polysemy in using that discourse strategy. On one hand, information-seeking is a required behavior as school counselors practice, and asking questions is a usual way to get information. On the other hand, asking questions of another person can be seen as an imposition and therefore a means of threatening solidarity and consequently interpersonal relationships. Thus, the supervisor indicates it is perhaps a good idea to avoid posing all one’s questions (described using the hyperbolic fifty-two times a day, line 38) to the same person (the director of guidance, line 36): while asking questions creates connection with others and demonstrates appropriate professional behavior to some extent, it also may be problematic. In a long spate of talk not shown here, the supervisor explains how a counselor-in-training from another course she taught had expressed that she felt question-asking was ‘childish’. The supervisor describes this to emphasize the point that despite such feelings, asking questions is part of ethical behavior for counselors; any given counselor cannot know everything about every situation, so questions must at times be asked even if this feels uncomfortable.
Kim, however, reintroduces asking questions as threatening to relationships within a school-counselor-in-training’s community of practice in how she describes a previous employment experience she had at another institutional site – a hospital:
(3) 1 Kim: Um I worked in - I worked a job for a year at a → 2 highs - at a hospital, 3 in between uh undergrad and grad school, 4 and . all I can say → 5 is that I know that even though the ethical thing to do, 6 was to ask questions, 7 because every person’s situation [WAS different,] 8 Supervisor: [Uh huh.] 9 Kim: and that’s what we were supposed to do. 10 If you actually did it, 11 like I did, 12 it was incredibly frowned upon. 13 Supervisor: People got annoyed with you. <chuckles> 14 Kim: People got really really annoyed, 15 and you know very easily, 16 even though . that’s what was really best → 17 for the patient in the situation. 18 Supervisor: Mhm. 19 Kim: So there really isn’t an expectation. 20 ‘Yes it’s the ethical thing, 21 but it annoys us, 22 so don’t do it’. 23 Supervisor: Mhm.
In her metadiscourse, Kim constructs asking questions as damaging solidarity with others. It apparently imposed too much on others in the community of practice – it was incredibly frowned upon (line 12). The supervisor suggests this is so because it annoyed people (line 13), an idea that Kim accepts and amplifies in line 14 (People got really really annoyed) and in lines 21 and 22 in a form of constructed dialogue Tannen (2007) calls ‘choral dialogue’, which represents the speech of a number of people as if uttered in unison (‘Yes it’s the ethical thing, but it annoys us, so don’t do it’.).
The TA also contributes to this discussion of the speech act of asking questions. He is in a unique position to comment, having a transitional identity himself: he is neither a supervisor nor a student in this setting. He explains how when he was a new counselor he identified and sought out a variety of people to whom he could pose questions. This, he indirectly suggests, could be a way of not ‘annoying’ other people and a way of not exposing all of what one doesn’t know to any one person; the comment also reinforces the supervisor’s earlier remark that a counselor-in-training should pose questions to others beyond the director of guidance (excerpt 2b, line 36). Another counselor-in-training, Sara, however, supports Kim’s point and emphasizes how asking questions may damage interpersonal solidarity:
(4a) 1 Sara: I actually have the same thing as Kim → 2 going through my mind. 3 I was going to say for me, 4 what holds me back just thinking of like when, 5 I was even like new on the job, 6 in the past or like at internships, 7 is feeling really annoying, 8 because it is annoying, 9 especially when you’re getting like your bearings → 10 the first month or so, 11 like procedures and stuff, 12 so just because you’re CONSTANTLY asking questions, 13 and I definitely felt that, 14 like a couple of times in the past, 15 so.
Here, Sara indicates that a hesitancy to ask questions is drawn from prior experiences, where continually asking questions leads to feeling that one is being really annoying (line 7) because, in fact, the behavior is annoying (line 8). She thus suggests that question-asking is possibly damaging to professional relationships, although it is necessary.
Next, the supervisor works to tease out Sara’s thinking about this issue, picking up on Sara’s reference to how she felt:
(4b) 16 Supervisor: You felt like people were annoyed with you? 17 Sara: Um, 18 I’m not sure if they were actually annoyed, 19 or it was more of my fear [of being annoying.] 20 Supervisor: [It’s uncomfortable?] 21 Sara: Yeah.
In this extract, with the supervisor pushing her to think more deeply about the issue, Sara expresses that she isn’t certain whether asking questions is in itself annoying, or whether she simply fears being annoying (in supervision terms, she wonders whether this is a personal, more so than strictly professional, issue; see Luke and Bernard, 2006, for a discussion of personalization in supervision; see also Bernard, 1997). Put differently, the supervisor is asking the counselor-in-training to think about the reality of the community of practice versus her own expectations, to question her own epistemic status (does she know, or does she just think she knows?). Whether question-asking is actually aggravating to others or just seems that way, however, Sara takes up a stance of uncertainty vis-a-vis the linguistic behavior: she is uncertain how it will be perceived by others. Sara also confirms the supervisor’s suggestion that asking questions (and not having knowledge) can be uncomfortable (line 20), thereby making more explicit her affective stance. In other words, a counselor-in-training is in a situation where she or he must (ethically, practically) ask questions, yet doing so potentially threatens the relationship with others who are full members of the community of practice. This contributes to the construction of boundary-dwelling identities.
It is the TA who links question-asking to perceived competence, another aspect of being a boundary-dweller and certainly relevant to professional identity development and display:
(4c) 22 TA: Well for me, 23 it’s - my (always) worry was, 24 were they going to see me as competent? 25 Kim: That too. ((nodding)) 26 TA: So here I am asking all these questions, 27 and I’m supposed to be the kind of — 28 ‘How are they going to view me?’ 29 You know, 30 ‘what the heck. 31 He doesn’t know anything, 32 he’s continuously asking stuff’. 33 (???): Yeah.
The course TA brings up another issue that the supervisor retrospectively reports she was trying to get at in the conversation and is addressed in her noting that a previous student found asking questions ‘childish’ – that asking too many questions may make a counselor (or a counselor-in-training) appear (or feel) like she or he lacks knowledge and, therefore, cause her or him to be perceived as incompetent by others in the community. The TA also takes up an affective stance that in some way echoes those expressed by Sara (who was uncomfortable; excerpt 4b, lines 20 and 21). His worry (line 23), however, was in regard to his own perceived competence (and thereby his place in the hierarchy), in addition to, if not more so than, solidarity. The TA uses constructed dialogue to represent his inner worries in line 28 (‘How are they going to view me?’) as well as how others might think or talk about him in lines 30–32 (‘what the heck. He doesn’t know anything, he’s continually asking stuff’.). The TA’s emphasis on competence and hierarchy is perhaps not surprising, given research on language and gender that suggests that many men tend to focus on hierarchical aspects of conversation, as compared to a general tendency for many women to focus on connections with others (e.g. Tannen, 1986, 1994). However, Kim, who spoke earlier on this topic, concurs that competence is an issue of concern for her as well (line 25), as does a student whose voice is unidentifiable (line 33). The TA then suggests, in lines not shown here, that one way of avoiding this is to ask one’s questions to multiple people, instead of the same person, echoing the supervisor’s earlier guidance.
In sum, in their discourse about discourse, specifically regarding the speech act of asking questions, these counselors-in-training, in talk with their supervisor and the course TA, construct questioning as a discursive site where solidarity can be damaged with others in the community of practice. Furthermore, a counselor can be deemed incompetent by performing this speech act too often or perhaps too often to one person; it thus has power and status implications as well. Their talk creates stances of uncertainty and concern toward question-asking as an activity and indeed toward their own place in the community of practice.
Discussion and conclusion
Transitional professional identities are complex. Indeed, our analysis reveals how in the context of group supervision they sit at the nexus of discourse, intrapersonal knowledge and affect, and interpersonal relationships. Specifically, in examining metadiscourse – and how, as part of metadiscourse, participants describe what they felt as they interacted with others in the community of practice, use negatively valenced affect words such as ‘anxiety’ and ‘confused’, and construct dialogue – we have highlighted how school counselors-in-training use language to create their boundary-dwelling transitional identities, and have shown how they actually construct language use as a critical component of their professional identity development. The counselors-in-training whose end-of-semester reflective discourse we examine frequently produce talk about talk in group supervisory communication with their supervisor (who also serves as their course instructor) and the TA for the course. In so doing, they demonstrate awareness that their own professional discourse strategies – the personal address forms they request others use and the questions they ask others – impact professional relationship-building, in particular regarding solidarity and competence or status. In producing metadiscourse, they take up affective stances of uncertainty and anxiety and epistemic stances indicating lack of knowledge, thereby constructing their transitional identities.
Our findings are important for our understanding of professional identity development as well as the linguistic strategies used to display, enact, and accomplish it. Speech acts and address terms are both resources for creating identities in everyday talk; we suggest that examining metadiscourse about them lends insight into the discursive struggles of professionals-in-training and other novices. This adds to previous studies demonstrating how novice professional uncertainty is linguistically realized and addressed by mentors and other experts, such as in narrative activities (e.g. Burdelski, 2004; Vásquez, 2007). Furthermore, our analysis identifies metadiscourse, specifically talk about the linguistic choices that boundary-dwellers face and make in their (future) community of practice, as worthy of further attention. This talk, we found, highlights relationships with others in the community with whom counselors-in-training must interact. Our analysis of talk about address terms and asking questions highlights how boundary-dwellers construct their relationships vis-a-vis key others: address term choice in particular may establish the hierarchical difference (or relative lack thereof) between counselors-in-training and high school students and may create inappropriate solidarity. Asking questions may lead to being perceived as acting appropriately, as evidencing incompetence, and/or as imposing too much on others. The complexity of question-asking and address term choice is brought out in how the participants portray their feelings and animate prior conversations. The counselors-in-training, in their talk in group supervision, thus voice the delicate balancing act that they perceive in terms of relationships, and how this is realized by, and constructed through, their linguistic choices. While it is well-documented in the supervision literature that relative novices lack key competencies (e.g. Stoltenberg, 2005), we identify specific ways in which novices struggle to interact with full members of the community; this is highlighted in stances expressed in the extracts we have analyzed. Regarding everyday linguistic choices – such as ‘what should they call me?’ and ‘should I pose this question, and if so, to whom?’ – counselors-in-training generally construct stances that show lack of knowledge and certainty, as well as negative affect (particularly anxiety, fear, and discomfort).
Our research, in uncovering the discursive difficulties of professional identity development, also lends insight into metadiscourse as an interactive phenomenon. While metadiscourse has been examined in a variety of contexts from discourse analytic perspectives, notably and recently in academic writing (e.g. Hyland, 2010) and public hearings (e.g. Buttny, 2010; Leighter and Black, 2010), to our knowledge, ours is the first examination of metadiscourse in the context of group supervision. In bringing together an exploration of metadiscourse and an investigation of professional identity development, we hope to have demonstrated the value of wedding these concepts.
One such value is potential practical implications for education and supervision. Although ‘talk about talk’ is omnipresent in supervisory contexts and has links to professional identity development, there is little guidance for supervisors about the structure of such talk and how to orient to it. We suggest that discourse analysis and especially the concepts of metadiscourse and power and solidarity are useful. As suggested in the counseling and supervision literature (by Luke and Bernard, 2006), any statement by a counselor-in-training in supervision becomes a potential point of entry into their learning regarding skills, their ability to identify themes and patterns, and their awareness of one’s own personal issues and experiences (these are called intervention, conceptualization, and personalization, respectively). Metadiscourse may serve as a means of addressing all these areas. For example, when Kim and Emma raised the use of address terms, instead of this supervisor’s focus being on the shifted felt experience associated with first name versus title plus last name (an example of personalization), the supervisor could have just as easily elected to discuss the actual counseling skills that Kim and Emma used to introduce, redress, or intervene with students (interventions), or how the counselors-in-training thematically conceptualized these instances. This could help scaffold and explore the ways in which the counselors-in-training understand and make sense of this within their work with students. Similarly, mention of asking questions could be used to enter into various productive discussions. For instance, forms of question-asking affect identity construction for students in academic supervision contexts, as Vehviläinen (2009) found: open questions portrayed an obvious lack of knowledge for students, while questions that offer candidate solutions avoid doing so. Although the linguistic form of questions was not addressed in our data, it is a topic worth considering in counselor supervision. In closing, while the relationships between the use of metadiscourse by counselors-in-training, their needs, and the goals of supervision require further exploration, we believe this is a ripe area for future investigations of language and professional identity development.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the counselors-in-training who generously participated in our study, and Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.