SCHOOL COUNSELING IN BARBADOS: An Ethnographic Study of the Roles, Practices, Challenges, and Demands

This chapter focuses on key issues impacting school counseling in Barbados and describes findings that emerged from an ethnographic study of the roles, practices, challenges, and demands of school counselors in Barbados. School counseling was officially implemented in Barbados’ secondary schools in 1988, but in the 32 years since, no research studies exist about school counselors, their work or the school counseling profession in Barbados. Therefore, the current ethnographic study was conducted to gain an understanding of school counselors’ experiences in Barbados and to explore their roles, practices, challenges, and demands. Interviews, observations, and field notes were the main data collection tools and a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was employed to analyze the data. Three themes with several subthemes emerged from the data: roles, responsibilities, and requirements (the 3r’s); problematizing the policies, politics, and culture; and school-family-community contexts. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for school counselors, counselor educators, and policymakers and a 21st-century Caribbean school counseling model.