Visualizations in Vocational Exploration

Do most of the vocation-focused assignments or activities that you do with students revolve around the written or spoken word? That’s exactly what I found when I was invited to team-teach the second iteration of a vocational exploration seminar for 70 first-year honors students. We had a great syllabus of readings, reflection papers, lectures, and small-group discussion questions, but, as a design professor, I was having difficulty delivering in one mode. Students were also struggling to stay engaged with little variety in our format.

I began looking for ways to include visual-based exercises. Each week, my colleague and I would look over the materials to determine one that we would shift into a visualization. We started small by adding visual components to worksheets: meters and scales for students to fill in as supplement to their written answers. To enhance small-group discussions, we invited groups to create collective Venn diagrams and affinity diagrams in response to questions.

Students enjoyed the variety of modes and remained engaged across assignments, small-group activities, and large-group lectures. More importantly, the visual-based exercises allowed them to explore their histories, values, dreams, and future plans in ways that provided a different kind of insight than words alone did.

All the technology that we used in the seminar was low-fi: pens, paper, and a printer. While only a handful of the 70 students were studying the visual arts, everyone was able to participate in and benefit from the exercises. Since then, I’ve also taught vocational exploration for upper-division students in the User Experience Design major, and I run similar activities through online collaborative whiteboard platforms like Miro and Mural.

In other words, you, too, can incorporate visualizations—word clouds, concept maps, 2×2 matrices, diagrams, charts, and dashboards—into your teaching to enhance your students’ vocational exploration. I detail a few visual-based exercises below along with short instructions, examples, and possible variations to get the ideas flowing.

Visual-based Exercises

Stepping Stones Timeline

As students explore what they have to offer the world and where they are headed, I want them to be grounded. How are they shaped by past experiences? What is their story? To exercise hindsight, I ask them to create a timeline of key moments in their lives. 

Instructions

1. Identify the five most influential moments in your life.
2. Plot the moments on a timeline. Include the following for each:
   • a descriptive title; and
   • the year and/or age it occurred.
3. Use the timeline as the center of a y-axis and map moments above (or below) the line by highs/lows, ease/difficulty, individual/community, etc.

Variations

• Change the number of moments to be identified.
• Provide a focus for the timeline, such as influential moments in your journey as a student, as a leader, as a citizen, as a designer (or other professional title), etc.

With moments mapped out on a timeline, students can more easily see patterns, pacing, and trends in their lives. The visualization helps students establish their personal narratives and lays out stepping stones to guide them into the future.

Inner Critic Avatar

When acting on big dreams for the future, students can get tripped up by their inner critics. I want to help students parse out what their critics are saying about their values and determine how much weight to give the critics. To start the process, I invite students to give their inner critics visual forms.

Instructions

1. Think about your inner critic, particularly when it’s critical of dreams for your future.
2. Imagine what it looks like personified.
3. Draw your inner critic.
4. Give your inner critic a name.

Variations

Instead of sketching, students could do one of the following:

• create a collage;
• use an online avatar creator; or
• write a prompt for an AI image generator.

By personifying the critics, students can envision having a productive dialogue with their inner critics, which will be indispensable for discerning vocational choices.

“We work for…” Mind Map

Whether a student has never worked a job before or is working full-time to support a family, I want to expand their understanding of work. Why might we work? How do we derive meaning from our work? To start the conversation, I invite students to create a mind map as part of a small group. At the center of the mind map is “We work for…” with the first nodes filled in from a class lecture.

Instructions  

1. Use the existing nodes as a jumping off point.
2. Add to the map any associations you have with the reasons we work.
   • You can add multiple words around one node and/or follow a linear trail from one word to the next.
     • It’s ok to go on wild tangents. The outer associations don’t have to relate back to the starting node. You are teasing out more meanings and relationships that might not have been originally evident.
3. Review the map. Mark overarching categories by using different colors, lines between, or shapes around related threads.

Variations

• Start the map with one word only.
• Mind maps can also be used to visualize structure. Ask students to create mind maps that display the arguments of an assigned reading or organize multiple perspectives.

After collaborating on the mind map, students have a broader perspective on work. The expansive network of nodes facilitates exploration of how students might personally approach work.

An Invitation

I invite you to include visualizations in vocational exploration with your students. I highlighted three exercises, but I encourage you to experiment with other types. Even quick or simple in-class visual activities can help students see their vocational journeys through a new perspective. My students tell me that they enjoy working a different part of their brains and often comment on how much fun they have while doing the visual-based exercises. Why not enhance your students’ vocational journeys, too?

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Kim Garza is a professor of design and director of the User Experience Design at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. Her academic interests focus on the intersection of user experience design, digital humanities, and social justice, while her teaching approach, program development, and nonprofit engagements center around mentorship and vocational exploration. She is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow, and was a member of the 2018 cohort of the Faculty Seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration. For other posts by Kim, click here.