Professor Tristram Hooley, Chief Research Officer, Institute of Student Employers, Professor of Career Education, University of Derby and Professor II at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, INN.

Career guidance has frequently been criticised as a responsibilising technology, which helps individuals to reconcile themselves to an unfair world. Its proponents have emphasised individual agency, but often ignored the influence of context. However, in recent years there has been a new wave of writing about career guidance, which has focused on ideas like context, community, social justice and resistance. Can career guidance be a site for individuals to ask radical questions about their place in society and to come up with radical answers about what needs to be done. In two volumes published in 2018 and 2019 Ronald Sultana, Rie Thomsen and I have been drawing this conversation together. We have assembled over 50 writers to explore career guidance through a social justice lens. In this presentation, I will summarise some of the key thinking that has emerged from this project and ask where it is leading the career guidance field.

Professor Elisabeth Öhrn, Professor of Education, University of Gothenburg. This presentation starts from the current dominance of urban studies in contem¬porary social research, and the need to explore more in depth rural youth and their schooling. It draws on a recent Swedish study on rural youth to discuss the importance of place, social structures, and young people’s views of their present and future lives as well as wider questions about rural-urban relations and metro centricity.

Restaurant H15, Halmtorvet 15, 1700 København. Informal social dinner at H15 – a restaurant in Copenhagen’s meatpacking district (costs 350 DKR including a glass of wine or beer).  

Rie Thomsen, Professor MSO of Career Guidance, DPU – Danish School of Education, Aarhus University and Professor II, University of South Eastern Norway, USN.

Helle Rabøl Hansen, PhD and founding member of NO1SE, Network Of Independent Scholars (in) Education.

In educational research, educational politics and in everyday discourse, young adults are often perceived as subjects on their way to something, there is a lot of focus on them being on their way to higher education, to worklife, to adulthood.  – as in transit. The understanding that youngsters are somebody in themselves is less common. The latter perspective suggests that young people are also beings, who experience meaning in the here and now.

In this paper I suggest that the becoming-perspective leave the young adults in transit. The contradictions between these two perspectives produce particular challenges in terms of the young person’s faith and trust in themselves and the world. I propose, inspired by empirical data, that these contractions leave the young adults alone and that this might be one of the reasons why we see an increase in lack of mental well-being in youth education in Scandinavia.

Transition into higher education: Students’ negotiations, challenges and strategies

Professor Lars Ulriksen, Professor of Education and head of the research group University Science Education at the Department of Science Education at Copenhagen University.

In the keynote, I will discuss what students experience as challenging when entering a new higher-education programme, and that these challenges, inter alia, are related to the culture of the programme, and therefore can add to social imbalances in higher education. Further, I will argue that some students adopt study practices that may hamper their learning outcomes, and that this in part is related to the difficulty of relating study activities with practice such as future careers. Finally, I will suggest that some of these challenges could benefit from combining competences and insights from teachers and counsellors at the institutions.

Reflections and thank you for your participation see you in Lillehammer in 2021