I found our last class with Grant really useful in giving us an overview of what we have learnt this term and it did help consolidate a lot of the ideas we have touched on. It also reminded me of why we had learnt them which was not always so obvious to me at the time!
It was good to look at Illich’s views on professionalism and Schon’s reflective practitioner but even in the short time since we covered them I can see more clearly why they are important. The value of questioning ways of doing things, looking at alternatives, not becoming routinised and evaluating practice is much more obvious now that we have spent a bit more time on placement! Getting ‘critical friends’ to look at your practice and questioning your relationship with management are all clearly useful idea for us once we are practising career advisers.
I THINK I now understand the differences between the dominant philosophies and how they fed into theory and practice such as Rogers, Super and Hollands’ humanism with it’s belief in the core good of humans and it’s focus on rationality and measurement, the ensuing existential critique of this from Heidegger and Sartre highlighting the lack of ‘essence’ and therefore lack of meaning in the human state and Neitzche’s post modernism, acknowledging the social and cultural context of human existence and the cynicism about ‘progress’. I THINK I can see how these philosophies contribute to different career theories and therefore to different practices.
But I still find it difficult to know where I stand on all of them – I can see aspects of all of them that I would use under certain circumstances and I suppose I instinctively like the ‘tool kit’/'chocolate box’ idea of technical eclectism. My current favourite (the strawberry cream) is the constructivist/narrative approach as this nicely resolves the psychology/sociology divide and highlights the usefulness of community influences and the limitations/horizons of the individual’s world but I can also see the value of the unpopular coffee cream of matching approaches which I think could still be useful depending on the context and the situation of the individual. And then there are all the other chocolates in the box which, again depending on the context, may provide useful insights or techniques…
I understand that using technical eclectism should come with theoretical integration and the use of Watson’s ‘personal model’ but as yet I have not developed this. I am guessing this will come once (or should I say if!) I am practising as a career adviser. I suppose what I’m saying is that having the background awareness of the philosophical ideas, the different theoretical stances and the range of techniques available, while making choices more complicated and confusing has to be a good thing in the end. Maybe in time, though, I should try to decide which type of chocolates I like best and stick to them rather than being a glutton and eating them all! But I will try to always keep up to date with what’s new on the market and any new products or flavours that emerge…
