Reading duration: 8 minutes

Author: Bo Klindt Poulsen, VIA University College and Aarhus University Denmark

The question of social justice in career guidance has been a key concept in the field since it first began. Frank Parsons, one of the founding fathers of career guidance, opened his Vocation Bureau – often called the world’s first career guidance bureau – in Boston in 1908. Parsons was not only a social entrepreneur; he was a central figure in what could be called a utopian-progressive movement in the USA in the second half of the 19th century. His aim was to create a society of mutualism, “based on Christianity and brotherly love,” and this is also a central notion in his work in career guidance and in his posthumously published book, Choosing a Vocation (1909). For Parsons, career guidance is an important part of improving societies, both for the individual and for society. Thus, in many ways one could argue that the notion of career guidance is born in the nexus between individual and society, and in the relation between the personal and the political.

Bo Klindt Poulsen at the Euroguidance Conference 2019 (© OeAD / APA Fotoservice / Hörmandinger)

 

Jumping approximately one hundred years forward in the discussion of career guidance and social justice, one of our great contemporary career guidance scholars, Tony Watts from the UK, describes career guidance as inherently political, “Career education and guidance is a profoundly political process. It operates at the interface between the individual and society, between self and opportunity, between aspiration and realism. It facilitates the allocation of life chances. Within a society in which such life chances are unequally distributed, it faces the issue of whether it serves to reinforce such inequalities or to reduce them.” In this quote, Watts really gets to the core of both career guidance practice and the discussion of social justice. Thus, a central question that must be asked is whether the way we perform career guidance services serves to reinforce inequality or to reduce it for individuals and societies. To me, from a social justice point of view, this is the professional creed of career guidance, and it really underlines Watts' point that career guidance is political.

We also see this in the 2013 communiqué from the International Association of Educational and Vocational Guidance (IAEVG), which speaks about the aim to increase efforts for social justice by embracing social justice as a core value that guides the practice and how IAEVG members have an important role to play in leading and promoting research and practice located within a social justice agenda. In other words, we find the question of social justice at the forefront of one of the central organisations of career guidance. This notion of career guidance as political and as a phenomenon that connects to the creation of good societies, is also the driving force for three of the most prominent scholars both in the field of social justice and the field of career guidance in Europe today: Professor Ronald Sultana from the University of Malta, Professor Rie Thomsen from Aarhus University, Denmark, and Professor Tristram Hooley from University of Derby, UK. They joined forces a few years ago to try and initiate a broad movement to promote what they framed as a sociological turn in career guidance. To put it very pointedly, they saw a development in the field of career guidance that was very much focused on the individual. A development that took its space theoretically and methodologically in psychology, in growth and development of the individual, and was more focused on looking inwards into the individual, making it the responsibility of each individual to secure and promote his/her own development. This was highlighted by Prilletensky & Stead (2012) when they pointed out how contemporary career guidance approaches tend to “emphasise self-development, self-improvement, self-efficacy, self-creation, and self-regulation, all hallmarks of societies valuing individualism, as ways to make optimal career choices… and seldom consider how the working world may be restructured from ethical and social justice perspectives to the benefit of workers.”

Sultana, Hooley and Thomsen call for a sociological turn where instead of relying primarily on psychological theories and methods focusing on the individual, career guidance draws more on sociological and pedagogical perspectives. Perspectives that focus more on the community, society and the individual in relation to these communities rather than solely on the individual themselves. Central to their endeavour are two anthologies, which they edited in 2018 and 2019, named ‘Career Guidance for Social Justice: Contesting Neo-Liberalism’ and ‘Career Guidance for Emancipation: Reclaiming Justice for the Multitude’. These volumes are collections of very fine and interesting chapters from scholars from all over the world. Not only from the privileged parts of Europe, but also from the Global South. In many different ways, the contributions discuss career guidance and social justice theoretically, conceptually, in research and in practice. The first book is perhaps mostly concerned with research and methodology, while the second volume is more focused on practice, i.e. asking “What can be done?”

In the anthologies, Sultana, Hooley and Thomsen try to formulate an operational definition of career guidance for social justice. This is of course a very big question, however, they tentatively present their definition of career guidance in this way: "[...][C]areer guidance supports individuals and groups to discover more about work, leisure, and learning, and to consider their place in the world and plan for their future. Career guidance can take a wide range of forms and draws on diverse theoretical traditions, but at its heart it is a purposeful learning opportunity which supports individuals and groups to consider and reconsider work, leisure, and learning in the light of new information and experiences and to take both individual and collective action as a result of this.” After this attempt to identify how career guidance could be envisioned from a social justice perspective, the next question for Sultana, Hooley and Thomsen was how to turn this rather broad and abstract definition into something closer to practice. What they did was try to identify five signposts from the different contributions in the two books that would be able to support a more socially just career guidance, cf. fig. 1.

 

Five signposts for a more socially just career guidance (© Bo Klindt Poulsen)

 

It is about building critical consciousness with the people we work with in career guidance, it is about helping them to name oppression, it is about questioning what is normal, it is about encouraging people to work together, and it is about working at a range of levels. In the second volume in particular, these five signposts are developed and discussed, and I reference this book for further reflections and perspectives.

 

Diverse answers to the question “In what way can guidance contribute to social justice?” ("Mentimeter"-Tool)

 

In the remaining part of this article, I would like to highlight the two last signposts, which are concerned with encouraging people to work together and working at a range of levels, since they link very closely with my own contribution to the anthologies, a chapter in the first volume entitled ‘Widening opportunities for career guidance. Research circles and social justice’. I co-authored this with two colleagues, Randi Skovhus and Rie Thomsen, and a central point for me with these two signposts is the recognition that it is not the individual career guidance counsellor who is responsible for changing the systems toward more socially just practices. We can only get to that point if we work at a range of levels, whether that is at policy level, at organisational level or at a practical levels, to name just a few examples. We can only reach this point if we work together.

My reflections on social justice through professional collaboration derive from a research and development project in Denmark called ‘Insights and Outlooks: Career Guidance in the Final Years of Compulsory School’. It was initiated by Local Government Denmark (the association of municipalities in Denmark) and the Danish Teachers’ Union. What we wanted to explore both in research and in practice was how pupils in the seventh to ninth grades in Denmark (between the age of 13–15) can obtain more knowledge and experience with upper secondary education and especially vocational education programmes and occupations through experience-based learning. Or to put it another way, how can we help pupils widen their opportunities when it comes to education and jobs.

From a Danish perspective, this was quite a large project. Around 1400 students from 17 different schools participated, along with many teachers, local companies and a large number of career guidance professionals. The overall project consisted of 13 local projects that were all very different from each other; each of the participants in the projects made their own application and had their own focus and their own interpretation of widening opportunities. Some of them worked with widening opportunities in relation to personal and social skills, and some of them worked on how school subjects could contribute to career learning. A good example was relocating maths classes to the local VET (vocational education and training) school and having maths teachers from VET taking over grade seven, eight or nine maths classes for a week or more. Others focused on work experience and partnerships with local companies.

 

Participants in the project (© Bo Klindt Poulsen)

 

The one thing that united the projects was a common theoretical ground: career learning theory inspired by the late British career theorist Bill Law. According to Law, a successful choice in education has to be built upon the very concrete meeting between the world of education and the world of work. These meetings have to connect within the context of the students’ everyday lives. They must be well-organised, give the pupils the opportunity to sense and experience education, and there must be the opportunity to adapt and reflect afterwards in order for the pupils to understand the meeting. That was the common notion that all of the projects dealt with, despite otherwise being very different.

Moreover, representatives of the local projects and researchers worked together throughout the project. We used a collaborative method called research circles, where researchers and practitioners work together to create new knowledge. Over a number of different meetings, researchers and practitioners worked to explore and create new knowledge together. The method is based on participatory research and it is linked with action research and action learning. The idea is to have research and practice work together more closely than they would with more traditional methods, where the researcher is a kind of teacher and the practitioners take in the new knowledge. We wanted to explore and expand these roles and work together as researchers and practitioners to challenge what is taken for granted, move away from normative stances to be more curious in working together, and we wanted to create spaces for reflection on action for both practitioners and researchers.

In the research circle, no form of knowledge is preferred or valued over another. Instead, we try to establish a reciprocal relationship between researchers and practitioners, with the practitioners’ knowledge being just as important as the researchers’. By combining them, we try to find common ground for developing new knowledge. Specifically, we as researchers were facilitators of the circles, and we asked the practitioners to bring concrete, empirical examples from their work in the projects with them to each meeting. The project meetings were not about us controlling their progress or giving them feedback on their progress. We asked them to bring something that made them wonder, something that surprised them or something they did not quite know what to do with, and we made that the basis for common exploration.

A significant result from the project from the perspective of the pupils, was a very clear tendency for the pupils to express a change in their perception of vocational education and training and vocational jobs, as well as their respect for it. They had changed their minds. They had learned something new. They also expressed a change in the way they spoke about education with their parents. One of the teachers that we interviewed, who took part in the pupils’ work at a VET school and was there for several weeks working in different subjects, observed that the pupils also surprised each other. Several of the academically strong pupils were really challenged when they were handed a tool, while it was quite opposite for many of the others. Several of the academically strong pupils said, “I’ll never be able or skilled enough to become a carpenter.”

What happened was a change in the evaluation of what is and what is not prestigious, what counts as an ability, what kind of abilities do you need to have, and so on. You can be good in some areas and not so good in other areas. There was an increase in respect for each other as well. We also noted a significant change when we looked at the development of the teachers taking part. One of the teachers said that the way they had worked in the research circles made them “[…] feel optimistic when we go home, because it is so exciting to see the very different projects we are involved in and to get some input that helps us see the matter in a different light so that we do not give up.” Another teacher talked about the courses they are typically offered as professionals, which inspire optimism, but the content of which is forgotten a week later. Here in the research circles, “we keep returning to the project and have some things to work with in it, and I honestly think that has been really great.” What all the teachers highlight in the interviews is the importance of being in professional learning processes and developing as professionals in new ways.

One of our conclusions is that the research circles became arenas for social justice. They became arenas where practitioners and researchers inspired each other and developed activities to promote social justice in practice for the practitioners. However, we also found that at the same time the research circles became arenas of social justice. They became inherently socially just arenas of professional development. Not only were the possibilities for the pupils explored and widened through the project, but the possibilities for the professionals and researchers also widened as a result of their work in the research circles. They enhanced reflection on social justice and own practice. They fostered solidarity and understanding between research and practice in new ways. In the chapter and also in this article, I finish with a wonderful quote that is often attributed to the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead, “[n]ever doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

This quote underlines what happens when you get people to work together, and collectively work at a range of levels, as Sultana, Hooley and Thomsen’s final two signposts encourage. My call, thus, will be to consider the potential of working with social justice in career guidance not as individual projects, but as something that you think of as collaborative and communal aspirations. Something that we do together.

 

Research circles and social justice (© Bo Klindt Poulsen)

 

 

About the author: 

Bo Klindt Poulsen is a senior lecturer in career guidance at VIA University College and a PhD fellow at Aarhus University, DPU, in Denmark.

His research has focused on professional development of career guidance practitioners and career advisors with a special focus on career learning, Bildung and social justice.

 

Among his latest publications are:

Poulsen, B.K. & Buland Trond (2020, in press). Come together. Professional development of career guidance practitioners through co-generative learning. In Haug, E.H., Hooley, T., Kettunen, J. & Thomsen, R. Career and career guidance in the Nordic countries. London: Sense.

Poulsen, B.K. (2020) Insights and Outlooks: career learning in the final years of compulsory school, Education Inquiry, DOI: 10.1080/20004508.2020.1713691

Poulsen, B.K., Skovhus, R.B. & Thomsen, R. (2018). Widening opportunities for career guidance. Research circles and social justice. In Hooley, T., Sultana R.G. & Thomsen R. Career guidance for social justice: contesting neoliberalism (Volume 1, p. 211-225). Routledge. Routledge Studies in Education, Neoliberalism, and Marxism, Routledge, No 16.

 

This article is based on a keynote speech held at the Euroguidance Conference 2019 in Vienna “Opening Opportunities – Career guidance approaches through a social justice lens”