A postmodern, narrative approach to career planning

M.Ed.At the inception of the document the author narrates her own adolescent experience of exposure to a modem, positivist career planning process. Chapter one's narrative reveals how she experienced this type of approach as impersonal. This personal experience of alienation and marginalization motivated the search for an alternative approach to career planning for adolescents. The aim of the study is to define a postmodern, narrative approach to career planning and to demonstrate how it can assist highly verbal, creative and intelligent, but emotionally conflicted, adolescents to define a future career path. Assisting this population is understood in terms of the narrative imperatives of enabling the adolescents to find their own voices and in terms of enabling the adolescents to take personal responsibility for career planning. The adolescents are afforded the opportunity to co-evolve life stories that are personally meaningful and free from dominant parental voices. In chapter two the author contrasts the theoretical underpinnings of the modernist, positivist paradigm with those of the more postmodern epistemology. The writer then describes a narrative approach to psychotherapy which is linked to the postmodern epistemology. Postmodernism as a general theoretical framework, and the narrative approach as a 'method' which is epistemologically consistent with it, are then linked to the career planning field. Ultimately, the author defines how an alternative, narrative approach to career planning can be implemented. Chapter three concerns an evolution of a methodology that facilitates an investigation of this approach. The chosen methodology is an extension of the postmodern/qualitative paradigm and the author suggests that one ought to employ postmodern methods of investigation when investigating postmodern phenomena. The researcher expresses her intention to employ unstructured interviews with three adolescents in need of career planning. The interviews are then transcribed from field notes. Themes are analyzed according to Kerlinger's method of content analysis, Giorgi's method of data analysis and the writer's own unique synthesis of the data. The writer's unique synthesis is legitimized by the cybernetic of cybernetic notion of participant-observation which suggests that even careful observers participate in the construction of 'objectively' observed phenomena. Chapter four introduces the reader to the three clients. It provides some history/ contextual data on each and it presents each client's transcribed narrative. Each narrative is analyzed thematically and the individual utility of the narrative approach receives comment. The author also furnishes information about the ultimate concord reached with each client. Having explored each narrative individually, the author then moves to examine the three narratives as a collective body of data, commenting on similarities in terms of themes in the three stories. Ultimately, the writer uses this body of data to illustrate the theoretical tenets of the approach espoused in chapter two. Chapter five offers summary remarks regarding the perceived utility of the postmodern approach to career planning. Some more critical thoughts pertaining to this alternative method are also delineated. Finally, consistent with the chosen methodology, the author defers to the reader to decide if the approach has a personal utility