The full article was published in Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar & Nicole Kavner Miller (eds.), Not Ever Absent. Storytelling in Arts, Culture and Identity Formation (2015): 105-114, which can be bought here.
Storytelling as a Tool for Student Career Counselling
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar and Krina
Huisman
Abstract
Students at Dutch universities of applied sciences
are constantly expected to monitor their own personal and professional
progress, using models from the field of management. These abstract models
offer a top-down analysis of the learning process, mapping it with
pre-constructed categories. In this chapter, we will present storytelling as an
alternative bottom-up model for reflection. Narrative communication takes
personal experience as its starting point, and thus allows students to tell
their own stories rather than confine them to a one-size-fits-all model of
personal growth and development. We will present a typology for categorising
life writing, based on a genre classification developed by Russian semiologist
Mikhail Bakhtin. The typology discerns four genres of life writing, according
to how the protagonist can be placed vis-à-vis his or her surroundings, and
whether the protagonist is presented as constant or changing over time. We call
these four types of protagonists ‘heroes’, ‘growers’, ‘fighters’, and
‘picaroons’. We suggest that this model can function as a starting point for
dialogue between student career counsellors and students, and can be used to
analyse the stories students tell about their study progress. We will use the
study narratives of 24 students from a large Dutch university of applied
sciences who participated in our pilot study as examples.
Key Words: Life
writing, storytelling, stories of becoming, student career counselling, Mikhail
M. Bakhtin, A.J. Greimas, genres, narrative learning environment, narrative
counselling.
*****
1. Introduction
Student career
counselling, as practised at Dutch universities of applied sciences, is meant
to teach students to reflect on their personal ambitions and motives in order
to allow them to make more conscious decisions regarding their studies and
careers.[i] The aim is
to monitor students’ progress and prepare them for professional practice by
enabling them to develop career competencies and professional identities.[ii]
The counselling usually consists of group sessions and private conversations
between students and counsellors, as well as graded personal assignments and
group work.
Arguably,
student career counselling in its current form has a top-down design, in which
analysis of study experience using the models precedes reflection, and the
individual study experience itself runs the risk of remaining outside the scope
of the counselling. We propose storytelling as a bottom-up approach in which
reflection precedes analysis: with a minimum of instructions, but a clear
explanation of what storytelling encompasses, individual students are invited
to narrate their study experiences, after which student and counsellor
dialogically analyse the resulting study narrative.
After
discussing current practices of student career counselling in Section 2, we
will present an outline for study narratives in Section 3. In Section 4, we
will introduce a typology of possible genres with which study narratives can be
mapped. This can serve as a starting point for an analysis of study progress
and preparation for professional practice. We will illustrate our arguments
with the outcomes of a pilot study conducted at a Dutch university of applied
sciences. A group of twenty-four third- and fourth-year students doing a minor
in Storytelling were asked to hand in a study narrative in which they reflected
on their study experiences during the minor. Additionally, we held
semi-structured in-depth interviews with five of these students.
[i] Cf.
Kariene Mittendorff, Wim Jochems, Frans Meijers and Perry den Brok,
‘Differences and Similarities in the Use of the Portfolio and Personal
Development Plan for Career Guidance in Various Vocational Schools,’ The Netherlands’ Journal of Vocational
Education & Training 60:1 (2008): 77.
[ii] Cf.
Marinka Kuijpers, Loopbaanontwikkeling
(Enschede: Twente University Press, 2003); Gerard Wijers and Frans Meijers,
‘Career Guidance in the Knowledge Society,’ British
Journal of Guidance and Counselling 24 (1996).
