Looking to the future by inhabiting the performative

Artistic languages for career guidance in the university

Abstract

With reference to the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, together with the recent Recommendations of the European Council and the Italian Ministerial Guidelines on Guidance, the contribution intends to witness some workshop paths, promoted by the University of ### ###, by the PEPAlab research group of the Department of ### ### ###, starting from the academic year 2022-2023.

These programs – addressed to incoming, in itinere and outgoing university students –, have been designed and realized by using artistic, expressive and performative languages as tools able to trigger and support transformative learning (Mezirow, 2016). In order to promote guidance itineraries aimed at an integrated and harmonious self-expression (Caputo & Pinelli, 2019; Gamelli & Mirabelli, 2019), the contribution intends to show how arts can enhance the wholeness and complexity of the human experience, weaving together the emotional, cognitive, representational, and motivational components present in each life and training story.

Here, the dimension of "guidance" is primarily declined as an opportunity to gain tools and skills for self-assessment and recognition of personal potentialities, desires, present and future prospects, thus translating into a range of orienting skills. In this framework, the proposed art workshops represented learning contexts with respect to the University and work training experience of the students involved, promoting a critical reading and analysis of the Contemporary, without preconstituted schemes of reality but, on the contrary, promoting a research posture centered in experimenting and imagining other and unexplored future directions.