My collaborator, Mansi Sharma and I, have written an article to be published in a book on life skills by Springer on career information literacies (to be released in August/September 2021). Career information literacies can be understood as the ability to collect, evaluate, and interpret career-related information- a crucial skill for career guidance practitioners and clients alike. From a positivist perspective, clients have limited career information literacies, and it is precisely because of this deficit that career guidance practitioners, who possess these skills, can be of use to clients. Hence, it is in the interest of career guidance practitioners employing positivist approaches to maintain authority over such information exchange. Careers educators, however, may be interested in transferring these skills to students so that they can collect such information themselves. However, they too perceive themselves as experts with specialised technical and neutral skills in knowing where (e.g. websites) and how to (e.g. search strategies) look for updated career-related information. Usually, careers educators teach students to collect career-related information from “information landscapes” familiar to them.  Information landscapes are spaces “in which information is created and shared and eventually sediments as knowledge” (Lloyd, 2010, p. 9). Such an interaction between careers educators and youth is often a one-way interaction where youth learn how to access standardised and universal career information landscapes. Such landscapes are already embedded with the values of the dominant culture. For instance, websites may “rank” colleges and careers according to particular criteria of success valued in a neoliberal environment. 

In contrast to positivist approaches, constructivist approaches to career counselling encourage clients to explicitly map their information landscapes, and possibly facilitate a two-way exchange of information between landscapes. For instance, a career counsellor may ask youth to talk about meaningful incidents in their life or about their favourite books and popular culture. Through such conversations, career counsellors may get a sense of the richness of their clients’ information landscapes as well as the values and motivations that guide them. Such an approach has the advantage of being culturally relevant. Yet, such approaches are often limited to interpersonal conversations between clients and counsellors. Moreover, given that youth’s career information landscapes are shaped by region, gender, caste, and class which in turn shape their aspirations for work and life, a culturally relevant approach remains limited in terms of engaging with information landscapes beyond the ones imposed by social segregation. Hence, in our article, we explore what a transformative or critical approach to career information literacies might look like. 

A transformative or critical approach to career information literacies explore how unequal power relations shape the dominance and circulation of certain literacy practices over other forms such that they come to be seen as universal and standard (Lupton & Bruce, 2010). To do this, we prompted youth, specifically 10 young boys from a government school in Delhi, to map their information landscapes using questions related to certain sustainable development goals (SDGs). For instance, we asked them about how they think opportunities for education and work are shaped by gender (an issue that SDG 3 aims to address) and caste (an issue that SDG 10 aims to address). We asked them to tell us about what SDGs motivated them the most and to share incidents from their lives that generated such motivations. Youth also created videos to document key sustainable development issues within their own neighbourhoods thus gaining ‘technical’ information literacies while also critically thinking and articulating about how their career aspirations might relate with these issues. Most importantly, we shifted the conversation from between the counsellor and the individual client to their classroom where youth were encouraged to share their information landscapes with each other with the goal of democratising information exchange within the classroom community as well as to facilitate a dialogue on sustainable development issues that mattered to them (Whitworth, 2014). 

For instance, several young boys shared about their perceptions around how gender shaped career opportunities within their information landscapes. One boy said,

Mostly around me, in my society, girls don’t study much. Mostly, their choice is to take up Arts. They may want to do business. They feel they have more options in Arts. But, I feel, to a large extent, their parents don’t let them study too much. Maximum, in my society, 5-10 families only allow their girls to study. There’s quite a lot of discrimination…. Mostly boys also take up Arts. Nobody thinks about Science or Commerce. They think that commerce and science require more hard work. All of them [take up Arts], 100%.

For careers educators, the above quote is an illustration of how boys understand the gendered nature of opportunities for education and employment. This is an issue where different people may have different views and beliefs around what is realistically possible and what is desirable and equitable. We referred to such points of tension as “bumps” in information landscapes, that is, tensions between multiple actors within particular information landscapes. These bumps are resources for careers educators that they can potentially deploy to prompt critical conversations within a classroom community around how access to education and employment come to be gendered as well as could be transformed. In this way, we hope to democratize informational exchange as well as facilitate dialogue on concrete issues that matter to young people in their everyday lives.