Exploring Didactic Qualities in Career Learning Practices

This workshop explores how didactic design and cross-professional collaboration support meaningful career learning in compulsory school. Drawing on the Danish R&D project Co-Creating Career Learning – Leadership, Collaboration and Student Outcome, and its resulting publication Reality Makes a Difference (Thomsen et al., 2025), it examines how teachers and career counsellors integrate career learning into subject teaching and what didactic qualities characterise such practices. These qualities are discussed in relation to theoretical insights from Wolfgang Klafki (2000) and Bill Law (1981).

Purpose and rationale
Across the Nordic countries, there is growing interest in connecting compulsory education more closely with students' lives and the world outside school. Career learning engages students in understanding relationships between education, work, and society, raising important didactic questions: How can we design teaching that supports students in forming meaningful connections between knowledge, life, and possible futures? What collaboration between teachers and guidance counsellors makes this possible?

The workshop builds on a theoretical framework combining Wolfgang Klafki's (2000) concept of categorical Bildung with contemporary career learning perspectives (Law, 1981). Teaching should open the world to the learner and the learner to the world. Career learning thus becomes a Bildung-oriented didactic practice helping students develop curiosity, agency, and the ability to connect subject knowledge to the broader social and vocational world.

Structure and content
The workshop begins with key insights from the project, highlighting four didactic qualities:
1. Integration across subjects and real-world contexts
2. Authentic encounters and extended communities
3. Student involvement and ownership
4. Systematic reflection and processing

These qualities are illustrated through empirical examples from classroom observations and student interviews, demonstrating how students experience career-learning activities as engaging and meaningful when embedded in subject teaching.

Participants will work in small groups to discuss and explore how these didactic qualities can develop subject teaching in various national and local contexts, supporting reflection on how to enhance students' Bildung in a Klafkian sense. A plenary dialogue concludes the session, allowing participants to share experiences and identify new perspectives on conditions for integrated career learning.

Audience involvement
The workshop is interactive and dialogical. Participants actively engage in mapping, discussing, and reimagining subject teaching from a career learning perspective. The goal is to co-create new understandings of career learning as a didactic field bridging subject teaching, career education and guidance, and students' lived worlds.

Relevance to Nordic educational research
By connecting general didactics, Bildung, and career learning, the workshop contributes to Nordic debates on how teaching fosters courage and agency in contemporary education. It invites researchers, teachers, and counsellors to reflect on how didactic approaches can link knowledge of self and world, positioning career learning as a central didactic opportunity in contemporary schooling.

References
Klafki, W. (2001). Dannelsesteori og didaktik. Klim.
Law, B. (1981). Community interaction: A 'mid-range' focus for theories of career development in young adults. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 9(2), 142–158.
Thomsen, R.; Skovhus, R.B.; Mariager-Anderson, K. & Dimsits, M. (2025). Virkeligheden gør en forskel. Fag, dannelse og karrierelæring. DPU, Aarhus University.