Innovating Towards Career Learning Environments: Changes in Teachers’ Role Perception Regarding Career Guidance

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To realise a career learning environment for students that is more focused on careers and ‘life-long learning’, as opposed to concentrating primarily on gaining a diploma, teachers are increasingly supposed to approach their students dialogically in Dutch vocational education. A change in attitude and behaviour, however, is only sustainable if a change in the teachers’ own role perception is established. In this chapter, the aims and design of the COG/SVE project and the results of previous studies regarding the project is explained, as well as the methods used for the current longitudinal qualitative study. Interviews were conducted with 47 selected teachers participating in the project 4 times over a period of 3 years. The results of the study show that considerable development was achieved by many of the teachers from being primarily diploma focused to being primarily career focused. However, within the schools represented in our study, the change patterns of the individual teachers differed. The changes on the level of the organisation, as initiated by the innovation project, therefore appeared to exert different influences on the individual change processes of the teachers. We conclude that a change in role perception is a collective matter in communication and team learning, but it seems to require individual support and guidance. Thus, our recommendation is to support collective learning as well as the needs of individual members of teams of teachers in a dialogical manner.