Phase 1. Ask: Topic Exploration
For me, knowing that I need to find a job in the future or soon. Since graduating from high school, I have been worried about my future job because of the great pressure of competition. According to my experience, I had a career planning course when I was in college, but I think it is still only based on book knowledge, it is difficult to apply it in reality. Do the children know, or they know how to plan their careers? Moreover, I think children may know that they should work after graduating from college or high school, but they have little knowledge or experience in how to consider their work. When I was in college and after graduating from college, I became more aware of this problem, and the more I realized that it was not discussed in my educational journey. Career education will be a cornerstone, seeking help for student’s future careers.
Initial thoughts and questions:
- What is career education?
- What is the history of career education; what are the pros and cons?
- How can career education help students manage their life?
- How does our career education study help our career development?
- What should we do to better manage ourselves?
Career education was put forward by the educational circles within the 20th century, but it has not been well created due to the difficulty of execution (Hoyt, 1981). After this period, some educational plans gradually proposed connecting subjects with work, making a difference understudies decide career-related interface, and inspiring students to define education and career plans to supply help to all students (Hoyt, 1981). In spite of the fact that it is still challenging. Nowadays, career instruction is not only as it were a school subject, but too an arrangement of school-enterprise participation or work-based learning.
Career education enables students to connect their academic studies with future life and career goals to improve students’ own educational experience and future career prospects. (Welde et al., 2016) If students are engaged in career development since childhood, they can better engage in self and career exploration (Welde et al., 2016).
Hence, career education is a way to help students understudies in getting to be effective, educated citizens by making a difference then learn how to successfully oversee their life toward favored future conceivable outcomes(Government of British Columbia, n.d.).
In Canada, different provinces have different settings for career education. Career education has been taken into consideration by Canadian secondary schools as part of the curriculum of secondary schools, but there are also controversies regarding this trend (Gaylor & Nicol, 2016). Some people think that career education in secondary schools is a proactive way to help students see the connections and actual results between their studies. Others criticized it as a reactionary measure to prepare students for participating in the fiercely competitive neoliberal economy, which is based on the principles of human capital method learning rather than democratic learning (Gaylor & Nicol, 2016).
Lamanauskas and Augien (2019) claim that introducing students to various careers could help them better understand themselves and make the best career choices. Generally, students think that career image is the most important factor in making career choices (Lamanauskas & Augien, 2019). However, learning ability, lack of role models in the family all may affect students’ career choices to a certain extent. Furthermore, career choices will also be affected by factors such as gender, school type, parents’ educational background and income on students’ career decisions/choices. All this information will only be further understood when students accept the study. At the same time, research has shown that the most relevant factor that contributes to career choice is to understand your own interests and explore your own possibilities (Welde et al., 2016). Therefore, I think that in our inquiry, we can allow students to experience or experience different modes, so that they can feel what kind of form a career exists. When we explore the learning content in career education, what we expect is to develop practice for students’ real interest mining and future plans.
Although many studies have begun to gain a certain understanding of students’ career education, they tend to be more theoretical. There are various courses based on the development of students, aiming to make students understand the profession and help students realize the course of career education. Moreover, career education allows students to exercise their leadership skills and accumulate experience inside and outside the school to prepare students for the expectations of the workplace in the BC grade 6-7 career education curricula (2021). However, how to have a clear understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses through these studies, and make a plan for your own life, I think it may be worthwhile to inquire.
According to reports, most students believe that participating in career education has helped them learn more about themselves, have a better understanding of their profession, and are excited about what they can do (Welde et al., 2016). Therefore, I think that career education could help students better plan and manage their lives. Moreover, if students can make a plan for their future and are excited about what they imagine, then they may feel closer to their education and more interested in learning how to achieve their future life and career goals. It can also help students better understand themselves and make the best career choice. Professional information and consultation help to solve complex issues such as professional self-determination and career choice (Lamanauskas & Augien, 2019).
Finally, the reason why I hope to teach this career through inquiry-based pedagogy, as Bai(2005) states that inquiry could assist people to understand how to critically think, which is an effective way to acquire more information from self or others. Furthermore, for a certain objective, people may have different perspectives via inquiry and people could be more creative or have more comprehensive understanding(Bai, 2005). In other words, I hope my students enable people to think their their own understanding about career, and have their own plans and ideas to manage their life rather than limited to simple and certain circumstance through inquiry.
This video could help us to learn about the career in a more relaxed way:)
Thank you for your watching!