This session focuses on cultural inclusivity and career planning. When working with undergraduates at the University of Alaska, we found that traditional career planning activities – like self-assessments of academic, professional, and technical skills – were not resonating with our student community. As a first step towards improving our own processes, we analyzed career planning processes at other institutions. We wanted to better understand how students’ knowledge, skills, and experiences were positioned. We also wanted to better understand how students’ cultural wealth was framed. In these processes, we found two patterns: 1) much career planning frames students’ experiences, knowledge, and skills from a deficit perspective, and 2) career plans do not acknowledge the cultural wealth that students bring from their communities. Now, we are considering how to improve these processes. This improvement focuses on finding ways to support rural and Indigenous student and community interests; create a welcoming and responsive environment for student growth and exploration; and understand how our work can reflect the richness of our rural and Indigenous community partners. In this session, we will give a brief overview of our research thus far, but our main focus is engaging in a dialogue with session participants regarding how to make career planning more inclusive of students’ cultural wealth. As students think about their futures, how can we develop an elastic and flexible planning model that highlights the lived experiences, community wealth, and linguistic capital that students need to navigate institutions and careers? How can reframing this process contribute to institutional transformation?
