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Bill's activities
updated 20th November 2007

WHAT ELSE IS BILL UP TO?
2007-08

most recent in green

All of the Café's work is linked to on-going practice, research and thinking - in the UK and abroad. You'll find the main activities in that extended work below. There may be some that can usefully be linked to your own work.

practice

In partnership with Lincolnshire & Rutland Connexions Bill is working with schools to develop integrated programmes for personal-and-economic well-being.  The work is based on Bill’s recent work on Life-role-relevance in curriculum (LiRRiC), developed for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The Lincolnshire workshop material is available on this site.  

Bill’s work with Northamptonshire Connexions - based on themes in LiRRiC - is moving on.  It is now largely hands-on work, consulting with small groups of main-stream teachers, on-site.  They examine how ‘academic’ work can enable students for well-being in life.  The strategy is ‘follow the energy’ – working with a few self-selected teachers, who recognise the possibilities and have commitment and imagination to pursue them.  Their main concerns are that a well-being agenda confuses the performance agenda: so that students may, in examinations, stray from narrowly prescriptive criteria for achievement.  But they are glad of the freedom that the QCA reforms now offer.  Engaging students in learning for life is seen as needed and rewarding - all round.  You can get a run-down of the possible frameworks for action in reforming for well-being.

Bill is running a series of interactive workshops on the Café game Diagnosing career-learning needs.  The workshops draw on recently-revised support, which now links this diagnosis to the 'coverage-processes-influences' CPI framework.  Workshops are scheduled for EST Connexions, The University of Reading, the Latvian Department of Education and Dublin Institute of Technology.

Bill‘s work with the Canterbury Christ Church University Centre for Career and Personal Development has continued with the development of practical approaches to the uses of narrative in guidance and curriculum.  This work is presented as a keynote lecture to this year’s annual CCPD Conference. Alongside CCPD Director Hazel Reid's work, his paper Making Narrative Work will shortly appear in a CCPD annual publication.

Bill is involved in a narrative-based project of the Careers Research and Advisory Centre. The project is developing a website - 'iCould' - featuring videos of people telling their career stories. Some are well known, but the collection will represent all walks of life. The aim is to help visitors to imagine a greater range of possibilities for themselves - raising their aspirations. The site supports video with audio and text; and Bill's work will be to point to how learning to interrogate other people's stories enables people to take command of their own. That approach is set out in practical approaches to the uses of narrative.

Bill is working with a Higher Education Careers Service Unit ’blue-sky’ group, to put research outcomes into creative practice. Bill has agreed in principle to develop a version of the CPI framework to support the thinking of that development group. 

The Centre for Guidance Studies is offering day-long workshops on 'A Narrative Approach in Career Guidance'. Bill is running the events, using a stage-by-stage animation of storyboarding - an application of narrative methods. The next workshop is likely to be in the autumn. More information is available from Margaret Christopolous at CeGS.

research

We know too little of the dynamics of background cultural influences in the day-to-day lives of people who start low in the opportunity pecking-order.  In particular we don’t know enough about how some people beat the statistical predictions on their life-chances.  Working with Jackie Sadler and Barry Hansford, Bill is setting up an enquiry related to the economic well-being of college leavers. Jackie is a Fellow of the National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling. Barry is Assistant Director for Learning Support at Northamptonshire College. The work examines what happens, when young men and women - who may not have expected to move into higher education – are, nonetheless, now taking that possibility seriously.  Bill, Jackie and Barry are looking for formal and informal learning experiences which raise aspirations and catalyse change-of-mind. The evidence will be a series of personal narratives, in a form which identifies significant learning, and its impact on people’s lives. The project is currently negotiating for contact with students in post-sixteen education.

Bill is working with Rev Dr Simon Robinson and Paul Dowson, at Leeds Metropolitan University, on work which seeks out common-ground for enabling both spiritual and economic-well-being.  Simon is Professor of Applied and Professional Ethics, Paul is Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Global Ethics - both at Leeds Metropolitan University.  The joint work relates to Paul’s work on curriculum development -  entitled In search of a pedagogy for developing ethical consciousness and virtue.

In both spiritual and economic well-being, the above teams are working on 'turning points'  and 'change of mind' - features of narrative.  A research methodology is being developed from Bill’s recent work on narrative.  The underlying ideas are developed in  Fewer lists, more stories.  There is now a  practical guide to what Bill is calling ‘storyboarding’ – a narrative-based teaching-and-learning method.  It is set out in Career-learning narratives – telling, showing and mapping.  Bill is now working on story-boarding as a cost-effective basis for research. That methodology will form part of a forthcoming monograph Narratives for well-being – why we use narrative, how we might use it and what we can learn from it.  The monograph will appear on this site in early 2008.   An abstract will appear in a forthcoming article 'Making  narrative work'.  That article will appear in Constructing a way forward: innovation in theory and practice in career guidance (Canterbury Christ Church University, 2008).

Professor Lisbeth Lundahl at the University of Umea is coordinating a Sweden-wide project to support research and development in all areas of careers work. The project examines the links between careers work and a range of factors in its development - including policy, social change, and client- and student-need. Along with Dr Rachel Mulvey, retiring president of the ICG, Bill Is offering consultancy to the project - mainly pointing to the importance of acknowledging and harnessing the impact of informal learning from experience.

ideas

Bill’s keynote 2007 lecture to the Derby Centre for Guidance Studies Guidance Week is entitled ‘The future of careers education in seven-and-a half chapters’, and is based on his recent commentary on the QCA proposals for curriculum reform in KS3-4.

Bill has given permission for the Career-learning Café’s interactive process for ‘Diagnosing careers learning needs’ to be translated for use in higher education in China and in Latvia.

Bill has agreed to offer consultancy to The Hellenic Pedagogical Institute for the development of diagnostic psychometrics, and how they are professionally engaged by careers counsellors. The implementation of the project is being negotiated through the Careers Research and Advisory Centre. Bill hopes hopes that the team will include Anthony Barnes, Chris Bosley, Charles Jackson, and Barbara McGowan.

Bill has accepted an invitation to deliver a keynote lecture and a couple of workshops at the Careers Education Association of Victoria in Melbourne in December.  The title of the lecture is careers education out of the box. One of the workshops will draw on the recently-improved and -updated material planning for progression.

Bill has also accepted an invitation  to take part, with Dr Gideon Arulmani, in a series of seminars for policy officers in: the Victoria Department of Education; the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development; the Department of Health; the Department of Victoria Communities; the Department of the Premier and Cabinet; and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. An outline of ideas to inform policy action is available on this site.

Bill has accepted an invitation to deliver key-note lecture on ‘Career management - old learning or new’.  Bill is working with Dr Frans Meijers - a leading authority on career development in The Netherlands - and other career-learning researchers.  The conference is scheduled for The Hague, in April. The lecture will be based on Bill's account of needed practical changes careers work changes set out in reforming for well-being.

Bill has also accepted an invitation to deliver a keynote lecture at this year's annual conference in Southampton of the South Central Connexions Partnership. The lecture will be based on Bill's account of the need for serious rethinking in careers education out of the box.

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