‘Just Another Story’: Some Social Constructionist Perspectives on a Person-Centred Training Community

Introduction Over two consecutive years, from 1995— 97, I videoed a selection of community meetings on the full-time post-graduate Diploma in Counselling run at that time principally by Brian Thorne and myself for the Centre for Counselling Studies of the School for Education and Professional Development at the University of East Anglia. Having already facilitated two years of the course I could see that it had a kind of ‘greenhouse effect’! in terms of the rapidity of growth that it promoted in trainees and I wanted to record what went on in the community groups, where individuals’ growth so evidently manifested, without having any particularly clear ideas as to what would emerge.