Ethical Fairy Tales: Using Fairy Tales as Illustrative Ethical Dilemmas With Counseling Students

Abstract

This column is designed to underscore relationally based creative teaching practices used by counselor educators in the classroom. Our intention is to provide examples of novel, innovative ways for counselor educators and students to deepen their learning while collaborating toward a spirit of connection and cooperation. If you have implemented a creative teaching method or if you have adapted an existing method that you would like to share with readers, please follow submission guidelines in the author information packet available athttp://www.creativecounselor.org/Journal.html Learning to navigate ethical dilemmas is important in counseling students' training. According to the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (2009 standards, counseling students must receive ethics education. A common goal for counselor educators is to assist students in translating ethical theory into practice. One method traditionally used within counselor education is case examples. A creative way to apply case examples to ethics education is adapting well-known fairy tales into ethical dilemmas. We adapted six fairy tales to address typical ethical and legal dilemmas counseling students may face once in practice. Following each case example is a brief analysis, including corresponding ethical standards from the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics,viewed from a relational-cultural perspective.