Blog 2

Blog 2

I was really pleased with the conversations we had in class. It was nice to see so many perspectives on the first chapter and the questions associated with it. I blatantly stated in my first post that I thought the beginning of the book was really convoluted, but talking in groups helped me to attach anecdotes to the meaning of the chapter which was extremely helpful. I’m excited to keep researching and working with our groups!

As far as the readings for this week, I was really drawn to the article. I found myself at times disagreeing with how early it was suggested that children look at their career development. It was even evident in class by some of the results of people’s career tests from when they were younger (I realize giving career tests is not the point of being a career counselor), but obviously they gave answers that led the test/tester to make conclusions about what their career should be. What makes us think that implementing career development into elementary schools will be productive and not just create more stress on the children? Brown said that career development is a journey (2012), but shouldn’t we let kids have other journeys when they’re that young?

A positive of the article was that they did address the different stages at which to put genograms and family trees into the school system. I suppose making it a creative family project can’t necessarily hurt a child’s development. It was also interesting how Gibson really took the time to change the point of the assignment throughout a child’s years. It started out as making an actual tree drawing, to making a genogram and having the teacher and school counselor interpret it, to having the actual child (becoming adult) interpret what their family’s career history says about them (Gibson, 2005). That progression seemed well though out and important, if at least for a student to get to know their family’s background.

As far as the chapter in the book is concerned, there is something I thought was an interesting theme that I wanted to point out, and that is the constant mention of gender. At first, on page 27, Brown talks about how some career theories are able to be generalized because they were made at a time when men were the only ones who were able to work toward and get a serious career, but then the theme came back on page 31 when talking about Holland’s theory of matching personality type with type of career. Holland’s pure personality types like “realistic,” “conventional” and “investigative” were associated with being masculine while “artistic” was considered feminine. I thought that was a very interesting distinction.