In this post Matthew Diemer (Professor of Education & Psychology at the Marsal Family School of Education, University of Michigan) discusses how we can foster career development and social mobility amongst more marginalised people.
The typical way career practitioners address inequality (e.g., workplace racism, more limited career development opportunities in lower-income schools) is to avoid discussing it, for fear of discouraging more marginalized people. (Here, “more marginalized” refers to people whose social identities – such as racial/ethnic identity, social class background, gender identity, and their intersections – are more marginalized in society.)
Presumably, the fear is exposing more marginalized people to new understandings or insights about limitations and barriers in their social conditions. These understandings of social constraints have been widely believed to be demoralizing and associated with disengagement, an idea that can be attributed to the anthropologist John Ogbu, who theorized that “involuntary minorities” are less likely to engage with school and work as they understand inequalities in school and work. Metaphorically, if inequality is a toxin, then well-intentioned career practitioners try to limit the amount of this toxin that more marginalized people are exposed to.
Critical consciousness
This paradigm has been flipped onto its head, with the introduction of critical consciousness (CC) into career development theory and practice. CC takes an entirely different approach to the identity-based (e.g., racial, classed, gendered) inequalities that limit opportunity in school and in work. CC theory, widely attributed to the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, has a fundamental premise: interrogating, discussing, and acting on social inequalities fosters agency and capacity for autonomy for more marginalized people. In essence, as more marginalized people come to better-understand the historical and structural roots of inequality and act on the social conditions that limit them, they become better able to negotiate these limiting social conditions and thereby have more capacity to self-direct their lives.
As applied to career development and social mobility, CC theory suggests that as more marginalized people better-understand the historical and structural roots of inequality as well as the capacity to act on these constraints, they develop more capacity to engage with the challenges of school and work. The core idea is that more marginalized people experience inequality in their lives, on a daily or near-daily basis – and so avoiding inequality does more harm than good, because more marginalized people are already well-aware of racial, socioeconomic, gendered, and other inequalities.
Instead, fostering the ability of more marginalized people to attribute inequality more to structural and historical conditions, instead of individual failings, as well as the capacity to act on these social conditions, by directly addressing inequality, is beneficial. Stated another way, CC provides a way for more marginalized people to figure out how to play the games of school and work on an uneven playing field.
Evidence of impact
But it’s more than just armchair theorising. A series of rigorous studies, carried out over several decades and replicated with different samples and with different procedures, provide a clear message: greater levels of CC are associated with greater levels of school engagement and career development during adolescence, among more marginalized youth.
When studies follow participants over ten- to fifteen-year spans, those participants with greater levels of CC during adolescence attain higher-paying and higher-status occupations in early adulthood (approximately age 25) – even after statistically controlling for important confounding variables, such as academic achievement. Typically, this research is carried out with samples of BIPOC youth, living at or near poverty.
Key principles
This theorising and empirical research is all well and good, but what does this look like, in career practice? We can point to a few key practices and guiding principles.
First, people who are more marginalized benefit from discussion about inequalities in their lives, and how to challenge inequality, instead of avoiding inequality for fear of “discouraging” people (who experience inequalities on a daily basis). Again, this principle starts from a place of understanding that more marginalized people are well-aware of and experience inequality – so working with them to carefully critique, understand, and act on inequalities is a more empowering stance.
Importantly, this is definitively *not* telling people how they are oppressed, nor is it indoctrinating people into a particular view or stance on social issues. Instead, this is a dialogue-based and open-ended process of noticing and then discussing inequalities that clients voice (e.g., an adolescent student discusses an interaction with school staff that has racist undertones). Those lived experiences of inequality become platforms from which to connect lived inequalities to more shared and collective experiences of inequality. Returning to this same example, one racist interaction at school becomes linked to systems of whiteness in schools.
Second, more marginalized adolescents benefit from supported opportunities to be civically engaged and to challenge inequalities in one’s school and/or community. Instead of simply becoming “armchair activists” who can critique society, but do little to change it – the goal is taking action in the world to create a more version of it. Typically, action to create change is best taken in a collective manner. People benefit from peer support and collectivity when challenging inequality, because “small wins” can be hard to come by and because the process of creating change is generally quite slow. (For a very notable and recent exception, please see the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, considered the largest-scale social movement in U.S. history.) Specifically, this can take the form of collective protests, marching, boycotting/boycotting, community organizing, and other actions that are intentionally taken to change societal inequities.
Third, particular schooling models are associated with gains in CC for young people. As reviewed in Seider and Graves recent (2020) book, Schooling for Critical Consciousness, schools can align curriculum and instructional mission around CC. Those schools, over time, show significant gains in students’ CC, via the implementation of frameworks such as the “Three Is” of oppression (internalized, interpersonal, institutional) that guide discussion and curricula, and via supported opportunities to engage in social action (to name two examples). Similarly, ethnic studies curricula, where students learn the histories of their racial/ethnic group, and link historical struggles to issues facing their racial/ethnic group today, are also an established practice to foster CC. The Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona (in the U.S.) is an exemplary program; further, many states in the U.S. (California, Minnesota) now require an ethnic studies course for high school students. There is empirical research in support of this consciousness-raising approach to career development. For example, randomized control trials demonstrate that career interventions are more impactful if they contain CC element than a standard “business as usual” career intervention.
Final thoughts
In sum, this article aims to convince practitioners that the communities they serve are better-served if career practice directly addressed, rather than avoided, social inequalities. Importantly, this process of addressing inequality needs to be collaborative, dialogue-based, and careful – rather than “teaching people about how they are oppressed” or indoctrinating. Theory and empirical research support this core idea, as do randomized control trials. In addition to the links provided above, this theoretical article and this resource support practitioners’ capacity to meet the needs of their clients who face more marginalizing social conditions.
Further resources
Matthew gave an excellent presentation to the OECD recently on this topic. He has kindly shared his slides below.
Other useful articles for people who want to explore this topic further are as follows…
Cammarota, J., & Romero, A. (2004). Reflexiones pedagógicas: A critically compassionate pedagogy for Latino youth. Latino Studies, 4, 305-312.
Cammarota, J., & Romero, A. (2006). A critical compassionate intellectualism for Latina/o students: Raising voices above the silencing in our schools. Multicultural Education, 14(2), 16-23.
Theory and empirical research on critical consciousness and career development:
Duffy, R.D., Blustein, D.L., Diemer, M.A. & Autin, K. (2016). The psychology of working: A theoretical model. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 63(2), 127-148.
Career guidance for social justice 
Intersectionality and Race Theory could added as part of a framework to analyse career guidance theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Crenshaw
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[…] August Matt Diemer set out his consciousness raising approach to career guidance. In a brilliant post he sets out, not just what the approach is, but also the evidence that backs […]
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