Читать книгу Everyday Courage - Niobe Way - Страница 22

WHEN I FIRST decided to study urban adolescents’ perceptions of their worlds, I had already been working for two years at the high school that would be my research site. I was a mental health counselor in training with ten assigned cases a semester—pretty plush circumstances given that the school’s full-time guidance counselors each had more than three hundred cases. While there was a tremendous need for me to take on more cases, my school-based supervisor protected me from being overloaded because I was there to be trained. Since few of my peers in training wanted to work in this school (given the ratio of need to the resources provided and the fact that we were not paid), my supervisor feared I would leave if the work load became unmanageable. I stayed on after my practicum was over to counsel students for another few years; to help procure a federal grant to set up and codirect a five-year prevention/intervention project for at-risk youth in this school; and to follow, for my research study, a group of adolescents over three years.¹ None of the students whom I counseled, however, were involved in my study.