The road to employability through personal development: a critical analysis of the silences and ambiguities of the British Columbia (Canada) Life Skills Curriculum

Abstract

This paper offers a critical discourse analysis of a life skills career education curriculum for schools in British Columbia, Canada. This curriculum calls for the development of a set of life skills that are positioned as central to students’ employability. At the heart of the curriculum is a focus on personal development, in particular, the need for students to develop self understanding and learn from role models how to face and conquer adversity. This paper builds on existing criticisms of how notions of employability and life skills have displaced policy orientations and interventions that might address structural problems of unemployment, with a personal development orientation that places the burden of change and adaptation entirely on individual workers. The goal of this inquiry was to illuminate the assumptions and the underlying ideological terrain giving shape to this curriculum. Informed by the critical frameworks of Nancy Fraser and Ulrich Beck, as well as critical curriculum scholars, this inquiry found a number of disturbing silences and ambiguities in the personal development orientation. On the one hand, the lessons acknowledged the significance of emotions in students’ lives and the possibilities for students to learn from family, community and the wider society. On the other hand, the emphasis on individual responsibility and a heroic orientation to transcending adversity reflects the dominant neo‐liberal ideology wherein future employment depends on having the ‘right’ attitude and making the right choices – contextual and systemic factors fall away. Life skills curricula, like the one examined in this project, are important sites of investigation for they reveal the major shifts that have occurred in the political economy of career and worker education.

Acknowledgments

Jane Gaskell and Allison Tom have provided feedback and made important suggestions in the development of this article. We also appreciate the feedback from reviewers of this journal.

Notes

1. Rick Hansen is a wheelchair athlete who became well known for his worldwide fundraising tour to promote research into spinal cord injuries and disabilities. He subsequently became the President and CEO of the Rick Hansen Institute and helped to create the Disabilities Resource Centre at UBC.

2. Development of the curriculum grew out of a survey conducted of the BC schools districts to determine the extent of life skills training taking place. Based on the results, it was determined that a comprehensive life skills curriculum needed to be developed.

3. In BC, the Career and Personal Planning (CAPP) curriculum was initiated in the early 1990s in an effort to bring into schools the interests of community and employers groups (see Hyslop‐Margison 2000 for more details of the history of CAPP). Since its inception, CAPP has been a controversial programme. In 2002, the Ministry of Education announced that the old version of CAPP would be phased out. A new curriculum was being developed, particularly for grade 10, which would focus on career education with no personal planning content. Personal planning would continue to be part of the curricula for younger grades.

4. One video is directed at secondary students and the second video is directed a teachers, principals, counsellors and other educators.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Benjamin

Shauna Butterwick is an Associate Professor in the Adult Education Program, Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.