Spatialising Career Interventions for Inclusivity and Sustainability

The 'Spatialising Career Interventions for Inclusivity and Sustainability' (SpaCIIS) project aims to address rural sustainability through the unusual perspective of career education and guidance (CEG) provision.

Existing research shows that rural CEG provision can encourage young people to leave their rural communities and the project aims to ask whether CEG provision can be reimagined to more fully meet the needs of rural young people and their communities.

The project takes an interdisciplinary approach applying insights into place-conscious practice, and place and social justice, developed in the field of rural education to rural CEG provision.

Utilising Research Circles (RCs) (a form of participatory research), the project engages three rural Danish communities in researching the needs of their communities and co-designing place-conscious CEG interventions.

The project contributes to scholarship in CEG by: developing a new conceptualisation of social justice for CEG including consideration of spatial aspects of inequality, and developing a new model(s) of place-conscious CEG provision.

The project also extends rural development scholarship by exploring the role specifically of CEG provision in economic and population sustainability of rural communities.

Contributing to rural education scholarship, the project highlights the role of CEG provision within community-education linkages and explores the value of RCs as an innovative way to bring together different perspectives and generate community led innovations in this provision.

Practical outputs include the development of tools for delivering place-conscious career education that can be adapted for use across different rural communities, CEG services and CEG practitioners. Through these outputs the project seeks to improve the quality and efficiency of rural CEG services.