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1. Why do you need professional boundaries when supporting international students?
Professional boundaries protect us and our students. In our everyday work of supporting students, you need to look after yourself, as well as meeting the needs of your students. Having a professional boundaries framework will guide your decision making for everyone鈥檚 benefit.听
Mark Rainier, Manager: Student Counselling & Care, Massey University, outlines the critical importance of having professional boundaries:听
鈥淲e are caring people who enter these student support roles, and our training reinforces this. We are then faced with so many really sad situations and meet so many struggling students that we tend to reach out, possibly beyond what we should do professionally. We need to be clear on what is, and what is not, part of the pastoral brief. Which functions should be attended, and which are best not to attend? If we can help students to help themselves 鈥 if we can empower them and help them feel engaged in the institution, then we are being most 鈥榟elpful鈥欌.
A principle for knowing your professional boundaries: Teu le v膩
represents a commitment to ethical relationships, where the relational space between people must be nurtured and respected. In this way engagement with others shows commitment, trust and respect for each other (Anae, 2016). From the international student support perspective, it means that the relational space between the student and the practitioner is ethical and founded on mutual trust and respect, to achieve the best outcomes for each other. Whetuu Nathan, Ako M膩t膩tupu Teach First NZ, reflects:
鈥淲hen you share a relational space with someone you therefore have a responsibility, a duty of care and nurture for them. Teu le v膩 means you will endeavour to do what is right for the other - for the mana of the other. This means if you are not a qualified social worker, then find someone who is 鈥 that is your responsibility in this relationship. Knowing and sensing the knots in your stomach when the issue is rising above your capacity and ability.鈥 (W. Nathan, personal communication, 2021).
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What do professional boundaries provide?
- An understanding that if you are a practitioner working with international students, you are not a trained social worker or counsellor. You know the limits of your professional capability and when to hand over to a trained professional.
- A system of imposed limits and expectations so that you and your international student know the rules around your role which provides a level of safety for you and your student.
- Less anxiety for you as you know the limitations on the service and advice you can provide.
- Legal and ethical regulations around privacy and disclosure of student information.
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So what is the difference between a professional boundary and a personal boundary?
It is imperative that you know the difference between professional and personal boundaries when supporting international students.听
The difference between professional and personal boundaries is explored through the table below:
Case study -听 Georgia鈥檚 dilemma
Georgia, a tutor at an ITP, is very worried about one of her international students, Alita, who hasn鈥檛 been attending her courses and is not responding to the institution鈥檚 follow-up non-attendance emails or texts. Georgia has complied with institutional protocols around reporting attendance to administrative staff members, who are putting the regulation follow-up steps in place. Georgia believes that she relates well with Alita, as they have a good practitioner-student relationship which Georgia believes is friendship based. Before Georgia contacts international student support to express her concerns, she wants to go around Alita鈥檚 flat to check that she is okay.
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Question:
Is Georgia maintaining her professional boundaries if she goes to visit Alita to check on her non-attendance?
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Answer
鈥No: Georgia is contemplating an emotion-based response to friendship and is stepping outside her professional boundaries. A good practitioner-student relationship is not a friendship. Georgia needs to contact international student support to express her concerns so that they can follow up.听鈥鈥
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鈥Self-Check
Do you see any blurred areas around your own professional and personal boundaries?
Responding to your self-check:听
Know your own vulnerabilities around personal boundaries
When your personal belief systems influence your professional boundaries, they can impact on objective decision making.
- Reflect on what personal values, beliefs and previous life experiences that you have which may impact negatively on you applying professional work boundaries.
- What type of student, situation and issues may cause you to become over or under-involved with your student? Identifying scenarios means you鈥檙e more self-aware and ready to seek assistance from others in making balanced objective decisions.
- What behavioural changes do you need to make in order to separate your personal and professional boundaries?
No individual is the same. We all bring our own personal experiences, cultural values and beliefs to any life experience, both personally and professionally. Our relationship with our students can be located on a continuum of professional boundaries.
2. How to find your 鈥榸one of helpfulness鈥
Health professionals describe a 鈥榸one of helpfulness鈥 which lies at the centre of a continuum of professional behaviour. This 鈥榸one of helpfulness鈥 represents where the majority of health practitioner/patients鈥 interactions occur and where maximum benefit occurs. The same is true for international student support staff. Our 鈥榸one of helpfulness鈥 is where we provide effective, efficient student support.
To achieve balance, various caring professions such as and have agreed professional standards including codes of conduct that clarify professional boundaries. While international student support staff presently do not have such a code,听 Davidson鈥檚 (2004) (PRBC) provides one approach which can be applied to international student support.听
The PRBC Continuum is a conceptual framework for understanding professional relationship boundaries in the context of child and youth care social work. The framework is equally applicable for understanding and applying professional boundaries in an international student support context.
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In a professional work context, the balanced point on the continuum represents interactions with students that are safe and effective. Moving away from the balanced zone blurs the boundaries. Becoming personally entangled in personal relationships or becoming rigid is where most transgressions knowingly or unknowingly occur.
The Continuum identifies four areas of professional boundaries:
- Entangled boundaries - over-involvement
- Rigid boundaries - under-involvement
- Blurred boundaries - grey areas with potential for breaches听
- Balanced boundaries - .
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Let鈥檚 look at each of these in turn with respect to providing international student support. What do these relationships and boundaries look like?
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A. Entangled boundaries - over-involvement
The potential for over-involvement is ever present when dealing with a student in distress. Consider the following risks of over-involvement: 听
- Entangled boundaries are represented by over-involvement with your student. You may be placing more importance on this student鈥檚 needs above those of other students.
- As a caring person you are meeting your own emotional and social needs to the detriment of the student.
- Your over-involvement creates over-dependency on you by the student, as they are not given the life skills for self-dependency and the tools to work through their own problems. This creates an unnatural power imbalance.
- You are placing yourself at risk of burnout by trying to be all things to all people.
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Naturally our colleagues are kind but鈥μ
鈥Naturally our colleagues are kind, caring people who want to see good outcomes for students. But this can often lead to 鈥渙verreaching鈥 their roles and their decisions become clouded by compassion. This is not always in the best interests of students, who need to develop their autonomy as independent actors in their own development.鈥 (M. Rainier, 2022).
Case study -听 See Li鈥檚 boundaries
As a first language student support advisor, Li has students who come to her as they feel they will be listened to and understood as she shares the same language and cultural knowledge as them. They think of her as being their friend. They can become upset and unsupported if Li cannot 鈥榖end the rules鈥 to help them. Li has found that she must clearly tell students from their first meeting that, although they share the same language, any help that she gives them is according to her institution鈥檚 policies and guidelines. Li has found that when students know what boundaries are in place, it reduces students feeling unsupported and unhappy with the advice that she gives them.
B. Rigid boundaries - under-involvement 听
Sometimes we put up barriers around our interactions with our students and become under-involved with them. These are represented by the following:
- You are not listening or meeting your student鈥檚 needs. You are driven in meeting your own objectives, values and beliefs irrespective of your student鈥檚 needs thereby听
creating low levels of trust.
- Your student will not feel valued or listened to, so they are less likely to share information.
- In protecting your own mana, you are sacrificing the mana and dignity of your student. cannot operate when there is no respect for each other in a relational space.
- Recognise that you do not need to be in control, sometimes it is okay to let go and let others help.
- You may be putting up barriers to protect yourself from becoming too emotionally involved with your student and, in so doing, you become emotionally detached, distant and disconnected.
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Case study - Breaking rigid boundaries
Claire is a homestay coordinator at a high school and is responsible for homestay students and hosts. As part of her role, she keeps in regular contact with both students and hosts to ensure that all is well. When she first started in her role, she noticed that one of her students was looking a bit sad. When she asked if everything was okay in her homestay, the student told Claire that they were unhappy with their homestay as the homestay hosts ignored her and were happy for her to eat in her room on weekends when they had family around. The previous homestay coordinator had told the student that she wouldn鈥檛 be moved and to discuss her concerns with the homestay family. When Claire followed up with the homestay host, they told her that the student was withdrawn and they were happy for her to eat in her room and not interact with them as they saw the student as a boarder in a boarding arrangement. Claire immediately recognised that her predecessor鈥檚 rigid boundaries and under-involvement had been detrimental to the student鈥檚 welfare. Claire arranged for the student to be moved to a new caring homestay environment and observed the student subsequently blossom.
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C. Blurred boundaries 鈥 grey areas with potential for breaches听
What are the consequences of having blurred professional boundaries?
This project helps you address potential grey areas so you can address potential grey areas so you can ensure you operate within your 鈥榸one of helpfulness鈥. International student support practitioners are highly committed to caring for their students. However, sometimes boundaries can become blurred, despite the best of intentions.听
- Blurred professional boundaries lead to confusion for you and your student which causes unsafe practice. Student support staff are not trained social workers, nor counsellors. They need to know when to hand over care to a trained professional.
- Stress and anxiety levels increase for everyone when you over promise and under deliver as you can鈥檛 deliver what the student needs, and you are not showing integrity around your own work values.
- When you treat your international students as family members your decisions become emotionally based instead of objective. Recognise and understand that you are not your student鈥檚 mother/father/aunt/uncle/ sister or brother. When you treat students as family members, you meet your own caring feeling needs which can lead to ongoing behavioural transgressions in the future.
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D. Balanced boundaries 鈥 zone of helpfulness听
Finding balance on the professional relationship continuum is best exercised in the context of a supportive team with clear policies and guidelines:
- Balanced boundaries represent the zone of helpfulness. You know where you can help, what your boundaries are, and you work within your boundaries.
- Your decisions are objective, responsible, based on evidence, good judgement and self-reflection.
- You understand the level of power you have in the student / practitioner relationship so that you do not exploit your students鈥 rights as individuals.
Your student is at the core of your decision making. Their needs are respected within the context of .
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Case study - A team approach helps balanced boundaries
Sarah is a team leader of a national tertiary international student support team. She recognises the importance of maintaining balanced professional boundaries within her team. As part of her role, she arranges for fortnightly check-ins with each team member, in addition to weekly national team meetings. In this way she can check-in with individual team members by Zoom or face-to-face to see where additional support and training is required. Working with a national team, she recognised the importance of weekly Zoom team meetings to build up trust between team members so they could learn about each others鈥 strengths and where to go for help if Sarah was unavailable. This proved extremely useful during Covid lockdowns, when the team was working remotely and they could call upon each other鈥檚 assistance as and when needed to support their students. In this way the team members maintained their balanced professional boundaries despite working from their home environments.
In any caring support role, there is the potential for professional boundaries to be breached. This can happen in exceptional circumstances such as critical incidents. The main thing to acknowledge to yourself is that your decisions were based on your professional resources at the time and were made for the good of the student. These resources should include well-established team/institution protocols for spreading the load thereby mitigating risk when dealing with a critical incident. These will include ongoing support for you and team members.
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Balancing professional boundaries: an example
Massey University鈥檚 has been designed to take into account the needs of both students and support staff. The Tier levels are based on the different levels of student support provided according to the different skill sets of staff roles. Each Tier has structured professional boundaries whereby increasing levels of complexity are escalated to the next Tier level. [Click down to view diagram below]
Building your own bespoke Professional Boundaries Framework
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The Professional Relationship Boundaries Continuum (PRBC) provides a foundation for developing a theory-to-practice framework for balanced professional boundaries. How might you adapt the PRBC Continuum to meet your organisation鈥檚 needs? Try using the schema in the (McDonald, 2022) to build a bespoke professional boundaries framework for your institution. 听
Frameworks come in all shapes and sizes. They need to be relevant and usable by everyone. The schema in the Professional Boundaries Framework provides a template for your team to build a professional boundaries framework which meets the needs of your students and accentuates the importance of staff self-care. You can build a framework to meet the needs of student practitioner roles within and external to your institution and identify areas of risk of over or under-involvement, together with areas for upskilling, training and professional development.
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Now that you have built your bespoke framework how do you go about applying its principles to your educational setting?
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A kaupapa for balanced professional boundaries
Your bespoke Professional Boundaries Framework highlights the importance of international student support and provides a kaupapa for a balanced approach. It needs to become part of your institution鈥檚 culture, i.e. 鈥淚t is the way we do things around here鈥.
How can you achieve an understanding of balanced professional boundaries in your institution where everybody knows, understands and plays their part in cultivating the culture?
- Enlist staff engagement by asking for their feedback on your Professional Boundaries Framework to elicit 鈥榖uy-in鈥. This shows that you value staff views.
- Ensure that policies and guidelines are easily understood and applicable to all staff roles.
- Encourage staff collaboration so that they have a shared understanding of each other鈥檚 roles and how they can help and support each other. 鈥It is okay to ask for help.鈥
- Provide workshops, staff training and professional development opportunities around professional boundaries to reinforce your Professional Boundaries Framew