Out of Africa The Magic Box

The Magic
Box

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The Magic Box

During the summer of 1982 we had the pleasure of presenting a series of career guidance and counseling workshops to counselors and teachers in South Africa. That was 25 years or a quarter of a century ago as of this writing. The trip was our most unique travel adventure and thus it seems appropriate to include a description of our experiences in the Thinkpint Page “Traveling With Jack and Theresa.”

The workshop tour was arranged and produced by Barry Beck, Ph.D., counselor and educator in Durban, South Africa, who arranged for a host- contact person at each of the several venues we visited. The hosts made travel and per deim details which allowed us to concentrate on the workshop programs per se. What a gift! Barry is a world class organizer, among other attributes, who now resides in France and South Africa.
He was responsible for our orientation and familiarization to South Africa and continuing interest in that intriguing nation.

The content of the career workshops was based largely on learning modules we had developed in our University of Oregon courses and in our consulting practice, United Learning Corporation. The modules design allowed us to adjust workshop objectives and learning procedures to the nature of the several kinds of audiences involved as well as scheduling idiosyncracies of the several venues. Our learning aids and materials were organized in a large leather case, much like those airline pilots and manufacturer reps carry which we fondly came to call, The Magic Box.

Participants

Johannesburg

Workshop participants were young and middle aged adults including teachers, counselors, and supervisors in public secondary schools, technicons, colleges, and service agencies. Apartheid was alive and functioning in 1982 and Nelson Mandela was still in prison. Thus race was a variable to be considered when designing our educational tour. Barry Beck provided valuable counsel regarding this issue. While the racial designations took several forms, for example Asian was often defined as “other than white”, the official racial designations were and still are English Speaking White, Afrikaans (Dutch descendants), Black, Colored, and Indian. The participant groups consisted of White (English and Afrikaner), Black, and mixed race.

Career Center

The language of choice was English and the gender split was over all approximately equal but varied considerably according to venue. From our perspective and within the context of the semi-protected workshop groups, race was not a critical variable. More critical, we suspected, was that of administrative position. Those participants having administrative positions expected to be treated as socially superior to the rest, but that is not unique to South Africans. In the course of the 30 days we attended both formal and informal mixed race social events. At one or two of the informal cocktail parties several of the Black men referred to their official and unofficial wives without blinking an eye. We learned to take that in stride.

Learning Objectives and Topics

Learning Objectives

The workshops were designed to meet the following three learning objectives.

1. Assist participants understand a variety of career development concepts. Some of these were standard for the trade and others had been developed by us over several years.

2. Assist participants begin developing competencies for implementing selected career development concepts with students and clients. In order to do this participants needed to actually practice the procedures. We could barely implement this objective in the limited time available, but it was our experience that if participants understood several of the concepts and how to implement them, it was not especially difficult for them to generalize the methodology to other concepts and competencies.

3. Provide practice in developing additional career concepts and competencies applicable to the needs and interests of their students and clients and consistent with their particular conditions. In other words, clarify and practice the concept of creating career development materials.

Written descriptions of the concepts and procedures with which we were concerned were available in several of our publications including: “Career Survival Skills”, “Career & Life Planning Guide”, “Helping Others Help Themselves”, and “Producing Workshops, Seminars, Short Courses: A Trainer’s Handbook.” Consequently, there were documented examples of career development concepts and procedures consistent with our career development model and examples of creating procedures.

A particular three component definition of career was basic to implementing the career model upon which our work was based. It suggested that a career consisted of behaviors that could be organized under three kinds of life activities:

1. Job–behaviors which contribute to basic survival needs, i.e. making a living
2. Vocation–behaviors which provide a sense of self-fulfillment, self-worth, or contribution
3. Leisure–behaviors which contribute to recreation and aesthetic pleasure.

Water Utility

In other words, a career consists of those major activities which are of prime importance during one’s life. Selecting and preparing for a job, while important, is a restrictive perception for purposes of career planning. There are several key implications of this definition. For example it accommodates the idea that for some people making a living, i.e. a paid occupation, may not be the most important part of a career. There is plenty of evidence that this is the case for many people who choose not to climb the vocational ladder to success. For them, a job is a means to support kinds of behavior that have a higher priority in determining self worth. The JVL definition of career was attractive and useful for many people with whom we worked.

Learning Topics

Example of learning topics in the modules included:

* Developing Career Information
* Setting Realistic Goals for Career Development Programs
* Career Counseling vs. Instruction
* Including Parents and Other Adults in Career Guidance Programs
* Women and Careers
* Peer Counseling
* Setting Goals
* Using Modeling and Demonstration
* Value Clarification
* Role Playing
* Information Seeking Skills
* Conflict Resolution
* Decision Making Models and Skills
* Clarifying and Understanding Feelings
* Self-Understanding Models and Techniques
* Personal Assessment Techniques
* Support Groups (e.g. Job Clubs)
* Occupational Planning
* Job Interview Skills

Road Traffic

When appropriate we involved participants in identifying and modifying learning topics. Active participation in designing their own learning objectives and procedures was an eye opening experience for many if not most of them.

Learning Procedures

“Interactive Team Teaching”, in pedagogical jargon, was the presentation style from the participants’ perspective, but the learning effectiveness was very much dependent upon students being part of our Dog and Pony Shows, but it was Le Show that was most frequently mentioned in evaluations. We both had an interest in a systems approach to designing learning materials that served us well when we began collaborating on guidance and counseling materials. The cooperative developmental work was a very functional basis for designing presentations and exercises. By the time we did the South African tour we were sufficiently familiar with the content as well as one another’s presentation styles that we approached what might today be referred to as seamless.

Besides seeming educationally valid, it was fun. The verbal hand offs, seemingly spontaneous interruptions of one another, audience asides, role switching, leading questions and spontaneous use of participant involvement to make a point or raise a question added to the interest of the presentation without detracting from its learning value, or so we believed to be true.

Put another way, participant interest and engagement were most encouraging. Even though learning does not have to be a barrel of monkeys, it should be at least potentially interesting.

Witwatersrand University

The basic learning strategy usually began by describing a concept and asking the participants to generate information related to the concept and then applying it to themselves. For example, consider the concept of assessing one’s personal interests in relation to selecting a job with potentially high satisfaction. In addition to standardized interest inventories there are other ways to assess one’s interests. One is to have participants list 20 leisure activities they thought most and least interesting and then note the specific reasons that led to their interest ratings, thus creating a more general idea of personal interest. Another procedure is listing 20 jobs or occupations they have observed and then sort these by high and low interest and then noting what factors led them to rate them high and low. Both procedures can lead to a personal assessment of interest which can be used in evaluating occupations in terms of likes and dislikes.

We constructed video transparencies using bulleted lists, simple cartoons and overlays. Not exactly cutting edge technology, but they livened up presentations and showed demonstrated interest and respect for workshop participants. Oh if we could only have had PowerPoint!

Then in triads, each participant was asked to summarize what implications the information had for understanding their own interest and how they might use the interest information in planning for their career.

Planning Staff

When appropriate the triad discussion could be extended to explore the implications of reliability, validity, normative groups when dealing with career interest assessment. Using the triad model in the South African workshops, we were able to engage most participants in relevant discussions of topics.

Venues

The several venues included workshops of varying length and meetings with research and service organizational staff. For the record they were:

* National Institute for Personnel Research staff meeting, Pretoria

*Soweto Teacher’s College, Soweto

* University of Witwatersrand Careers Workshop, Johannesburg

* Technicon Natal and University of Natal, National Conference on Career Guidance–It’s Future, Durban

* Technicon Natal and University of Zululand, How to Develop a Career Guidance Program, Ulundi/Empangeni

* Rhodes University, Career Workshop for Teachers-Psychologists, Grahamstown

*Careers Research and Information Centre, Teaching Skills for Careers Guidance Workshop, Capetown

Instructor’s Mental Health

Participants at Work

On off days we visited two game preserves, wandered in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Grahamstown, several rural villages, did an overnight hike in the Drakensberg Mountains and got lost on the hills out of Durban. We met many interesting and helpful people, including Wynn Jerry, an independent business woman and several other nonparticipants who provided a different perspective of South Africa. We often realized that we were in a complicated and different civilization for four weeks.

Two or three workshop participants later enrolled in the University of Oregon Counseling Psychology Department and added variety to the student body.

We were wiser and better informed at the close of The Magic Box Adventure. We hoped our new South African friends appreciated how much we learned from them.