On September 6th, 2019, Gill Frigerio had kindly invited me to present at Coventry, University of Warwick after she had seen this video at the summer school in Malta. In this presentation (presentation begins at 14:29), I spoke about how we deployed the sustainable development goals (SDGs) to enable 10th grade young boys in a government school in India to think through their career aspirations.

My colleague, Mansi Sharma and I, have thought through these ideas further in this article where we illustrate using one young boy’s narrative how he makes connections between his career aspirations and particular sustainable development issues in his own life using SDGs as a semiotic resource. In other words, while a constructivist approach to career guidance engages with clients’ cultural resources such as favourite books and music or memorable incidents in their lives to construct career narratives, we suggested that including concerns within their neighbourhoods that matter to young people could be resources that can be employed in constructing career narratives. Such an approach asks young people to draw their attention towards their present, past, and future using a particular social justice lens, and construct one among many possible narratives using this lens.

While the above article is focused on an individual narrative, we were also keen to think about how we could enable a collective dialogue among youth on sustainable development issues while thinking through their career aspirations and goals. We engaged with Lloyd’s concept of information literacy landscapes in an article to be published in a Springer book publication tentatively titled “Life Skills Education for Youth: Critical Perspectives” that will possibly be released in September 2021. In this article, we suggest that careers educators could use SDGs to enable youth to document their career information literacy landscapes, and further engage in a democratic exchange of career-related information, and a dialogue on the sustainable development issues that such information is inevitably entangled with. We hope that shifting the conversation back and forth from interpersonal conversations between the counsellor and client as individuals (career guidance) to the classroom as a community of practice (careers education) might help in advancing “green guidance” in specific sociocultural contexts.