looking forward
Tabitha Grier-Reed brings career planning into the classroom
Career planning is usually learned piecemeal, if at all—a trip to the guidance counselor here, a talk with family there. But Tabitha Grier-Reed has made it her mission to bring this process into the realm of the teachable and re-imagine it along the way. After teaching a college course in Orientation in Self to Career for three years, she has been piloting programs at Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis and at an Iowa high school.
“I want to do this in a more community-engaged way, fully partnering with parents, students, and teachers to bring the benefits I've [seen] at the college level,” she says. “I want to do that for underrepresented students who might not have that much access to resources.”
Grier-Reed's powerful idea—that life-organizing processes are both personal and generalize-able—shows every potential of changing the way careers are taught. Developing your own life-planning process today requires thinking about your identity and its connection to family and community, says Grier-Reed. To that end, her students construct a career family tree, starting with grandparents and parents.
Both her college and high-school curriculum grew out of an attention to issues of equity and access in higher education. Grier-Reed attended Tuskegee University as a TRiO student and was a McNair scholar at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. At Minnesota, she was an adviser for the TRiO and McNair programs within the former General College before becoming an assistant professor in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning, where she worked as a faculty mentor for McNair. She also co-founded the African American Student Network, which meets weekly. Her research has shown that the organization has made an impact.
“What students have seemed to get out of it is a space where they felt safe to speak their mind and speak their truth,” she says. “They felt connected to a community here and validated.”
As she comes up for tenure this year, the Anniston, Alabama, native is teaching an introductory psychology course and a teaching practicum in the new multicultural teaching and learning certificate program. She also chairs the Minnesota Psychological Association's Women's Division, which she helped resuscitate.
The next step of her research, she says, is to more fully integrate her career-planning curricula into secondary education settings. She has applied for support through an Institute of Education Sciences grant to do so.
She's animated by the conviction, borne from experience, that students have more knowledge to contribute than is usually acknowledged. “My course assumes that students come in with a plethora of experiences,” she says, “and focuses on helping them sort these experiences in meaningful ways that can be mapped on to the world of work.”
Story by Peter S. Scholtes | Photo by Justin Evidon | September 2010
