20865 - Teaching Tensions: Juxtaposing Career Development and Critical Consciousness

Description

Recent work on FGWC college students has highlighted ethical costs of economic upward mobility (Morton, 2019) and the ways in which race and social class shape moral considerations involved in determining career trajectories (Kim, 2024). Other higher education scholarship has illuminated the ways in which corporations and business practices have increasing influence over college operations and futures (Eaton, 2022). Programs like the Gates Foundation and practices of referring to students as consumers suggest a Mcdonaldization of higher education and movement from critical and analytical thinking spaces to degree factories. This emphasis may pressure to students to prioritize economic success over personal ideas and identity. Sociology offers the ability and tools to interpret moral and ethical tensions, as the discipline imparts skills and knowledge to be successful in careers that range widely in the dimensions of both social impact and earning potential. This symposium session will ask participants to grapple with many of the tensions inherent in sociological professional development. Sociology majors and non majors ideally leave college with well-developed critical awareness of the exploitative nature of late capitalist workplaces while still needing to carve a path through collegiate and professional settings that reproduce existing inequalities. Part of this navigation includes differing moral and ethical valuations of relational approaches to work and career that run counter to individualistic and alienating training found in many academic spaces. We will share ideas for preparing students from a range of backgrounds and institution types, including community college and HBCUs, to enter a workforce rife with contradictions. The best way to help students is to give them the tools to process information and reject problematic and dangerous arguments. The session aims to develop a robust toolkit for helping students maintain authenticity as they traverse racialized, gendered, and classed workplaces.

Sub Unit

• Teaching and Learning Symposium

Presenter

• Nicole Bouxsein Oehmen, Shenandoah University

Session Organizer

• Myron T. Strong, Community College of Baltimore County