The use of participatory visual strategies to assist grade 12 learners to make constructive choices for life after school
Abstract
Many learners, who live in under-resourced rural and township areas under challenging socio-economic circumstances, face limited opportunities for further education and employment. This can influence their future life choices and could lead them to believe that they will not be able to realise their future career goals. If learners lose hope for their futures, they may develop a negative attitude towards life, with the possibility that they may make unhealthy and/or destructive life choices.
Life skills education, including career guidance education, is designed to play an important role in helping learners to develop in the relevant psychosocial skills to enable them to make constructive life and career choices. The compulsory subject Life Orientation in schools in South Africa aims to promote personal, social, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, motor and physical growth and development of learners through the provision of such skills. However, there is considerable evidence in literature that teachers are struggling to implement the Life Orientation syllabus in a way that would promote learner well-being and equip them with the skills to cope with life’s challenges. This is particularly true for teachers who work in communities that face multiple socio-economic adversities. Furthermore, career guidance within the subject Life Orientation is generally limited to the provision of information about specific careers and how to access them; this may be of little value to learners who need to be creative and identify ways to overcome social and structural barriers to pursuing their career choices.
Thus there is a need for life skills and career guidance intervention strategies that help learners to identify both the barriers to their career goal attainment, and the assets that they can draw on to minimise these barriers. Such strategies should be responsive to the life experiences of learners living in economically and socially disadvantaged contexts. Since the learners know their own context best, it is imperative that pedagogical interventions for this purpose should be participative and foreground the voice and experiences of the learners. In this study, I explore the use of two participative, visual pedagogical strategies, namely mind mapping and photovoice, designed to encourage participants to make purposeful and constructive decisions concerning their future life and career choices. I implement and evaluate the strategies to determine how they could be used by teachers as a tool to help learners to think more critically, realistically and hopefully about their future life opportunities and to make constructive choices for life after school.
The study is underpinned by a socio-ecological understanding of resilience theory and the related hope theory. Both are grounded in positive psychology and give credence to local culture and context. Guided by a constructivist paradigm, my aim was to facilitate the construction of contextually relevant and useful knowledge by learners to help them to reduce their vulnerability to the risks that might derail their hopes and dreams for the future.
I worked with 13 Grade 12 Life Orientation learners, attending a life skills course I was presenting at a community centre in a rural area. Three forms of qualitative data were generated: (a) mind maps of the barriers learners thought they would face in terms of attaining their career goals, as well as the assets they could identify that would support them; (b) photo artefacts with narratives that depicted both assets and barriers and (c) a recorded group discussion. The two participatory visual strategies were chosen because they are flexible, proactive, encouraged participation and allowed participants to express perceived realities of their own lives in their lived contexts. The group discussion created a space where participants could elaborate on and discuss their visual representations of their assets and barriers to give more meaning to the various issues that affected their choices. Analysed through the lenses of hope and resilience theory, the data revealed four themes: i) Learners can see hope for the future; ii) Relationships as assets and barriers to effective life planning; iii) Increase in sense of responsibility to plan for future; and iv) Increase in empathic awareness and willingness to help others. The findings indicated that the participatory exercises helped learners to identify risk and protective factors that could influence their future career and life choices. The participatory exercises also helped learners to take responsibility for their futures and seek alternative pathways by making plans to minimise or overcome risk factors and draw on protective factors. The strategies inspired hope in learners; helped them to identify assets and barriers in their social ecologies; develop a sense of agency and responsibility for deciding on their futures; and to care more for other people, all of which will help them to make more constructive choices for life after school.
The use of the participatory visual strategies, mind mapping and photovoice, was effective to help orientate and guide learners to make constructive life and career choices. The learners not only enjoyed the exercises, but it also helped them to identify hope for their futures and to unlock latent resilience. The study showed that the resilience and hope theories could be applied to help learners to plan for and make more constructive choices for life after school, contributing to the body of knowledge about resilience and hope.
The guidelines generated will help and inform future pre-service and in-service Life Orientation teachers to use alternative teaching methods so that they can adapt pedagogical strategies to be more contextually relevant.
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