Re-storying career practitioners’ professional identities as career and employability specialists through an online WIL capstone

ABSTRACT

Pedagogical partnerships are rarely used to explore how students develop agency through Work Integrated Learning (WIL). This study contributes to this gap by exploring how pedagogical partnerships between students, industry experts and subject leaders in a postgraduate online WIL capstone assisted students to gain clarity about their professional identities as careers practitioners. To further scholarly understanding and appreciation for pedagogical partnerships in WIL, we use narrative methods to provide insight into how careers counselling students learned the process of narrative counselling. We emphasise students’ learning as a re-storying of their professional identities as careers practitioners. We discuss the significant role pedagogical partnerships played in the development of co-constructed narratives that enabled student participants in this study to re-story their professional identities as careers practitioners. The paper concludes with observations about the implications of our findings, including resources needed for the pedagogical design.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional identity
• pedagogical partnerships
• narratives
• WIL
• re-storying

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr Melinda Bufton who contributed to data generation by managing recruitment of alumni and review of narrative summaries by subject leaders and industry experts. Special thanks to the teaching team and alumni who gave their time to generously share their perceptions and experiences of the subject, including feedback about areas for further development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).