Q&A with MA-IS graduate George Dutch

As I worked on my final project, my confidence was boosted in 2016 by winning the 3MT competition and presenting it at the FGS Graduate Student Conference because my academic community acknowledged my research and ideas.

Here’s the rest of the story: After 20 years as a career professional, I enrolled in MA-IS to explore a narrative method of career intervention with the objective of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of career change. I started my MA-IS program in 2011, took one course per semester and completed my degree in 2016.  MA-IS encourages learning research by doing it, so in Spring 2012, after completing a detailed research proposal for a class assignment, I designed a survey to collect data for a research question that I refined over the next two years.

In January 2014, I implemented my online survey and presented my research outline to a national conference of career practitioners held annually in Ottawa called Cannexus.  I also wrote a learning contract proposal for a Reading Course to examine existing research on the outcomes of narrative approaches in vocational counselling and to consider methodologies for analyzing the data from my survey. I then wrote up the results of my research and presented my findings for an AUGSA Research Development Day. I submitted my paper Life-story writing for career change: is it effective? A report on research to the Canadian Journal of Career Development, which was published in fall 2015 and included in a materials package received by delegates at Cannexus the same year.

Meanwhile, my MAIS courses about links between identity, prevailing discourses and power structures in society provided a conceptual context for interpreting my research findings. I started to focus on career as a cultural construct or “grand narrative” of certain ideas, beliefs and assumptions that shaped the career decisions of my clients by reinforcing a dominant social order organized around certain unexamined, unacknowledged beliefs that comes to stand not only for common sense but the only way to live, which I characterize as “The Canadian Dream” to illustrate the concept of cultural hegemony. For my final thesis project, I analyzed this hegemonic force—how it often impairs or impedes career change—and reconceptualized an existing Model of Transformation Through Writing to guide an experiment for improving the effectiveness of career change. I submitted my Final Project paper Career Change and Cultural Hegemony: An Integrated Approach Involving Transformation Through Writing to Concordia’s Sociology journal The Disestablishmentarian and, after peer review and editing, it was published in early 2019.

As a career counsellor, my studies have focused on career change, not as a luxury for a privileged few but as an increasingly necessary skill for millions of individuals who must transition out of jobs that injure them—physically, psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually—or for those whose jobs are outsourced to Mexico or replaced by robots. For individuals and society then, career change is an urgent and complex problem that lends itself to the kind of interdisciplinary approach offered by MA-IS.

I use a stringent definition of career change, one that involves a complete change in job title, employer and job tasks. As we all know, this kind of change is not easy. But certain writing exercises have proven effective in helping some individuals move from being stuck and suffering in a first career story to being empowered through a second story. This narrative approach to career change is currently represented by theoretical models that are biased towards personal agency (the ability for individuals to control their destiny).

The reality is, however, that individuals are highly influenced by a master narrative, e.g. good grades + good school + good job = good life. This ideological script of conformity, regularity, and predictability orders our external world but it also gets into our heads and dominates the way we think, so certain norms and values stand for common sense and are captured best, perhaps, in the phrase ‘The Canadian Dream,’ i.e. the main goal of work is homeownership through job stability.

The problem is this: this dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for many people because, in part, our dominant social order is now being reconfigured by social, economic, and technological forces that disrupt or destroy cradle-to-grave job security and contribute to significant social problems, such as mental-health disorders, economic inequality, and civic unrest.

Could certain writing exercises help individuals better understand how assumptions embedded in The Canadian Dream actually control and/or reduce their career choices? Writing allows many individuals to use creativity, spontaneity, reflection and other tools to explore career choices not determined by our dominant social order. Could these exercises equip individuals with tools to better manage their lives and careers while, perhaps, ameliorating certain social problems?

Ideas, beliefs, and assumptions have consequences. Today, the number one workplace disability is depression and related mental-health disorders. The fundamental model of counselling is to solve such problems at the individual level because the dominant model of thinking in our society is that people get sick or stay well based on their personal choices while society and culture play almost no role in their career issues. I disagree.  My AU experience observations has led me to focus less on individual beliefs and behaviours of my clients and more on the nature of the culture that we live in—particularly, the role of established social, economic or political systems in conditioning individuals to conform and submit to a dominant social order that often emphasizes wage slavery over emancipatory values. The words of Rumi, the poet, resonate: “It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Should career professionals challenge clients to look at the nature of the culture we live in?  This is the question that drives my interest in this subject.

For me: I continue to serve others as a career professional while expressing my MA-IS education through conference presentations, articles, posts, and through my participation as a dramaturge and performer with the 9^th Hour Theatre Company in Ottawa.

This project: I propose to test my Model of Transformation Through Writing with a Two Group Experiment—both groups will undertake the same proven writing exercises for career change, but an experimental group will learn how cultural hegemony shapes their first career story, a control group will not. My hypothesis is this: participants in the experimental group will construct a self-reflexive second story that helps them navigate quickly through cultural controls to achieve effective career change. If results are positive, then this research will produce knowledge to support career changers and transform the nature and purposes of their work. But I have not yet found a research partner for this project.

The flexibility of MA-IS—taking one course per semester while working full time—allowed me the time and space to really apply interdisciplinary ideas and tools to my work and life in a deliberate, intentional and systematic manner. Developing and executing a successful research project that resulted in publication was a deeply satisfying experience for me. I now read academic journals regularly. I think more carefully and deeply about how my ideas, beliefs and assumptions influence my personal and professional relationships. And, I certainly analyze politics and civic life through a more refined critical lens. In short, I believe my experience with AU improved my world personally and professionally.