An Ever-Changing Meaning: A Career Constructivist Application to Working with African Refugees.

Refugees are expected to determine how to integrate past experiences into their lives in a new culture. Constructivist approaches to counseling allow refugees opportunities to determine how to integrate these experiences into their future career choices. Refugee experiences throughout the resettlement process and a constructivist career counseling approach following resettlement are reviewed. ********** Constructivist counseling is a relatively new addition to the career counseling field. Peavy (1995) described this approach as providing a framework for counselors and clients to explore clients' experiences while addressing clients' career needs through reviewing themes and using narrative counseling techniques. By combining various fields, including philosophy, psychology, science, and cultural studies, this approach is founded on the concept of multiple realities (Peavy, 1995). This article describes a career constructivist application to working with African refugees searching for new career options. CONSTRUCTIVIST CAREER COUNSELING McMahon and Watson (2007) described career constructivist theory as a postmodern approach where counselors focus on the client narratives, listen for themes across life stories, and attempt to understand the worldview specific to the client. J. T. Hansen (2005) and Richert (1999) suggested similarities between humanism and postmodern philosophy from which constructivist counseling draws. These include a focus on the development of the individual, the significance of relationships (Richert, 1999), a respect for diverse experiences (J. T. Hansen, 2005), the importance of meaning creation, and a disinclination for diagnosis (J. T. Hansen, 2005; Richert, 1999). Both authors suggested that the integration of humanistic and constructivist approaches allows the counselor to focus on clients' present experiences as well as their constructed meaning of these experiences. This, in turn, permits the counseling process to be one in which clients can explore multiple meanings, placing the focus on the clients' developmental processes (J. T. Hansen, 2005; Richert, 1999). McIlveen and Patton (2007) explained the significant emphasis on the importance of relationship in the counseling process. They viewed career counseling as a collaborative approach where clients and counselors search for personal meaning within the stories told in session. Through this interaction, clients focus on the way they have made meaning in the world, and, with help from the counselor, they seek to create new narratives for the future (Campbell & Ungar, 2004). Brown (2002) identified the following four assumptions for career counseling from a constructivist approach: 1. Everything is interrelated. Within this context, career counseling is also personal counseling. The counseling process explores the relationships among all aspects of the individual's life. 2. Nothing is absolute. A constructivist approach assumes the existence of multiple realities and experiences; therefore, the counseling process respects human complexity by acknowledging these multiple realities and the multiple responses to them. 3. Behavior is relative to its context. As multiple realities and experiences exist in a given situation, individual responses to these experiences will vary. Therefore, all behavior must be considered within the context of the experience of the individual. 4. The individual's subjective perspective is the most objective. Constructivism assumes that clients understand their lives from their own perspectives, and these views should be focused on during counseling (Brown, 2002). Individuals' perceptions of experiences of their cultures are integral components of this framework; therefore, counselors and clients examine the connections between culture and social justice within the career experiences of nondominant groups. Constructivist theory also allows clients to choose a collectivist cultural framework rather than the individualistic framework that dominates Western culture. …