This book presents a new model for conceptualizing and applying a social and cognitive perspective on therapeutic practice. Building on the micro-skills framework for training, the author adds cognitive modifiability theories to create a social cognition approach to training and practice. The material has been field tested in a graduate academic context and in consultation in mental health settings, and chapters contain didactic explications, illustrative examples, practice exercises, and graphic schemas to help readers integrate specific practices into a broader comprehensive theoretical framework. Mental health professionals and students in advanced counseling courses will find that this book broadens their perspectives beyond basic micro-skills approaches and provides an expansive and systematic framework for conceptualizing the therapeutic process.

This book defines and examines the needs of the marginalized student and presents a theoretically grounded model to guide institutions of higher education toward developing new and more effective programmatic responses. Taking the implementational experience of the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein, South Africa, as a case study, it investigates the experience of students who present problems of learning and inadequate preparation for sustained performance, including learning disabilities, lack of study skills, motivational factors, and cultural support systems. Further, it identifies the pressure for institutions to be responsive to social and political pressures to accommodate the needs of students previously excluded from participation in higher educational or vocational training opportunities. In addressing this timely area of development, the authors formulate a unique conceptual foundation for the consideration of a new paradigm, based on cognitive and biosocial theories: those of the theory of structural cognitive modifiability and mediated learning experience and of Feuerstein and Bronfenbrenner’s ecosystem structural orientation. Innovative, applicational, and optimistic in nature, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, administrators, and postgraduate level students working across the fields of higher education, educational psychology, and student counseling.

This book presents a new model for conceptualizing and applying a social and cognitive perspective on therapeutic practice. Building on the micro-skills framework for training, the author adds cognitive modifiability theories to create a social cognition approach to training and practice. The material has been field tested in a graduate academic context and in consultation in mental health settings, and chapters contain didactic explications, illustrative examples, practice exercises, and graphic schemas to help readers integrate specific practices into a broader comprehensive theoretical framework. Mental health professionals and students in advanced counseling courses will find that this book broadens their perspectives beyond basic micro-skills approaches and provides an expansive and systematic framework for conceptualizing the therapeutic process.