Wednesday 22 July 09:50 - 11:20

Hall: 28 - Room 6 SPT

Chair and Presenter: Mcmahon Mary

Division: Division 16: Counseling Psychology

In a world of rapid change and complexity, many disciplines, including career counselling, have been challenged to reimagine and reposition their practice. This reimagining has largely been influenced by a contextualist worldview and constructivist and social constructionist philosophies and has seen career counselling re-positioned as a narrative practice. Narrative career counselling is emerging as a dominant force and several approaches have been proposed which, in spite of their common foundations, emphasise different constructs and processes.
In keeping with its foundational worldview and philosophies, all approaches to narrative career counselling reposition the role of clients and career counsellors, the counselling relationship, and the nature of career counselling. In particular, clients are viewed as experts in their lives and career counsellors are viewed as facilitators of a respectful and collaborative process that positions clients as storytellers and valuable sources of information. Narrative career counselling draws heavily on the stories clients tell and expects them to take an active role in the career counselling process and in constructing their future stories. Clients tell stories of their experiences in a range of past and present contexts and, together with a career counsellor, attempt to make sense of those experiences in order to construct and enact a future story. In general, narrative career counselling is viewed as inclusive and able to cope with complexity.
Narrative career counselling is the focus of this symposium. Four presentations each overview an approach to narrative career counselling, consider its advantages and disadvantages, provide examples of its research base, and propose future directions. The importance of developing culturally and contextually aware narrative approaches is evidenced in these presentations.