Chapter 6: Creating Career Narratives: Contextualizing Adolescent Career Development and Constructivist Career Counseling

Constructing personal, social, and vocational knowledge begins early in one’s life as one embarks on the process of creating his or her own personal story or narrative. As a preschooler, imaginative and interactive play represents two of the most important cognitive developmental feats to accomplish. Imaginative play prompts the preschooler to develop schemes for various social, emotional, and cognitive structures, within a non-evaluative and semi realistic manner, while interactive play encourages the preschooler to utilize a variety of cognitive structures to construct meaning and experiment with diverse role plays. Initial cognitive structures are comprised of declarative and procedural knowledge structures, scripts, schemes, and embedded meanings that later lend themselves to the more complex cognitive structures of conditional and domain specific knowledge, encoding specificity, and the development of metacognition.