Personal Development Planning in Higher
Education: A Gender-neutral Approach?
Dr James Moir
School of Social & Health Sciences
University of Abertay Dundee
Scotland, U.K.
INTRODUCTION
• This paper considers the ideological effects of recent
person-centred
discourse
concerning
personal
development planning (PDP) in higher education
• On the face of it this discourse seems personally
liberating but there are a number of problematic issues
that follow on from this inward focus.
• Whilst PDP may appear gender-neutral it is argued that
this is a discursive veneer that covers over the
problematic issue of a gender-divided labour market.
• PDP is now entrenched in policy initiatives in higher
education institutions following the Bologna Declaration
of 1999 which aims to aims to create a European Higher
Education Area by 2010.
• A range of modernizing practices have been adopted at
the institutional level in order to regulate the practice of
studying, such as generic descriptors, personal
development planning and progress files.
• The European Union Lisbon Treaty of 2007 and
European Commission Lisbon Agenda for addressing a
globalised knowledge economy aims to enhance graduate
employability and competitiveness.
• Graduates are required to be adaptable, multi-skilled
and flexible; able to plan and take charge of their own
careers in an age of increasing and rapid change in the
workplace.
• The engine for this is PDP with the aim of providing
graduates with the skills required to meet these
demands.
• Whilst this discourse claims to empower students by
equipping them with the key skills required to be
adaptable and flexible, it also normalizes the notion that
coping with labour market demands is an individual
responsibility.
• In higher education this reforming discourse has
therefore spawned as set of powerful catchwords such as
‘graduate attributes’, ‘personal development planning’
and ‘employability’ to legitimize the integration of
economic purposes into curricula.
• The first part of this paper considers recent
developments in PDP in the U.K. and how this has led to
a concern with an instrumental approach to learning.
• The second part considers work-life balance and the
way in which a gender-neutral terminology leaves
matters up to individuals and obscures the issue of how
this is addressed and targeted more towards women than
men in the workplace.
PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF PDP WITHIN
HE: THE POSITION IN THE U.K.
•
It has been just over ten years since PDP was
proposed by the National Commission into Higher
Education in the U.K. (The Dearing Report).
•
The discussion of PDP advanced in the report stresses
a structured and supported process designed to help
students to reflect upon their own learning and to
plan for their personal, educational and career
development.
PDP is often represented as a cyclical process.
The basic principles of PDP include the following:
• goal setting and “action” planning
• doing (learning through experience with greater awareness)
• recording (thoughts, ideas, experiences, learning)
• reviewing (reflections on what has happened)
• evaluating (judgements about self and own work in terms
of what needs to be done to develop/improve/move on).
• However, whilst such an approach can be enabling for
students in their learning there are tensions that emerge with
such a focus on the individual student.
• These are often political issues concerned with matters
such as (i) national, institutional or departmental PDP
policies; (ii) access to PDP records; (iii) academic or
vocationally driven.
• These are issues which can become dissolved in the
instantiation of PDP in terms of the overall focus on the
individual and the need to get policy translated into action,
and especially via the increasing reliance on VLEs.
Others have pointed towards the tensions that arise in the
different uses to which PDP is put:
Clegg & Bradley (2006) examined varying perceptions of
PDP within one institution and propose three ‘ideal types’
that encapsulate the attitude of different
subjects/disciplines:
• Professional (e.g. Teaching)
• Employment (General Orientation & specific skills)
• Academic (Metacognitive & subject-specific skills)
Ref: Clegg. S. & Bradley, S. (2006) Models of Personal Development Planning;
practice and processes British Journal of Educational Research, 32 (1): 57 – 76)
• These tensions in PDP were drawn out and articulated
in interviews conducted with staff and students in the
social sciences in one recent study (Moir et al. 2008):
Perceptions of Personal Development Planning (PDP) in
Sociology and Social Science: The Scottish Higher
Education Context.
• Whilst PDP was almost universally accepted in
principle, the perceptions of implementation raise some
problematic practical issues.
Ref: Moir, J., Di Domenico, C. Veritgans, S. & Sutton, P (2008) Perceptions Personal
Development Planning in Sociology and Social Science: The Scottish Higher
Education Context. Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences, 1, 2 1-39.
• PDP has to function as a public policy related to such
themes as employability and the development of graduate
attributes, as well as something that is private and
personal to the student.
• When considering the discourse of PDP it clear that
whilst there is a positive connotation with the notion of
personal development, this is not simply about a neutral
inner process in isolation but rather is related to wider
political and policy related issues.
• There is often a concern with the notion of individual
self-direction and planning, employability, and improving
the nature of graduates as future employees in terms of
national competitiveness in the face of a globalised
knowledge-driven economy.
• If PDP is viewed as being driven by students then the
political dimension dissolves away as they engage in the
practicalities of the educational process.
• Learning the process of PDP becomes the end in itself
in an instrumentally-driven fashion.
WORK-LIFE BALANCE DSCOURSE
• This kind of focus on decision-making in terms of
personal development can also be found in the discourse
of ‘work-life balance’ in today’s workplace.
• The use of gender-neutral language in the WLB
rhetoric of today’s world of work can lead to the
impression that gender stereotypes are no longer a
constraining factor, especially for women.
• There is a view that as far as is reasonable, employers
and employees should work together to ensure that family
commitments are not sacrificed at the expense of work.
• This discourse of diversity is meant to be open to all and
is based upon the view that it is a matter of individual
circumstances and choices.
• The argument that we are all individuals and are all
have different circumstances effectively ensures that the
pervasive patriarchal models of work are left unchallenged
in the background.
• In doing so, a focus on diversity can actually absolve
political and organizational responsibilities for tackling
equality of opportunity for women at work.
•In one of the earliest applications of this approach a study
of equal opportunities talk, similarly found a mix of
‘principle versus practice’ discourse with regard to gender
and employment opportunities (Wetherell et al. 1987).
•Supporting equal opportunities in principle provides and
‘ideal’ position whilst talking about (external) practical
employment issues (e.g. maternity cover, childcare) to
undermines this as the ‘reality’ of matters.
Ref: Wetherell, M., Stiven, H. & Potter, J. (1987). Unequal egalitarianism: A
preliminary study of discourses concerning gender and employment opportunities.
British Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 59-71.
•Other discourse analytic (e.g. Stokoe & Smithson, 2001)
work has shown how a gender-blind approach to talk about
such issues through terms such as ‘flexible working’ and
‘work–life balance’ occludes inequality for women.
• Participants’ interview accounts routinely followed a
‘gender-neutral’ trajectory but fell back on a ‘generic she’ as
the subject of equal opportunity.
Ref: E.H. Stokoe and J. Smithson, J. “Making gender relevant: conversation analysis
and gender categories in interaction.” Discourse and Society, 12, 2, 243–69. 2001
• The use of gender-neutral terms inevitably leads to
falling back on the individual as the source of freely made
decisions about working hours, parenting and childcare.
• So long as both women and men construct these
‘decisions’ and ‘choices’ as primarily a matter for women
then a gender-neutral language of work-life balance may
do little more than preserve the status quo.
• The rhetoric of WLB is often equated with that of
personal choices and decisions. This creates a dichotomy
between personal life and career and the notion that this
tension requires some resolution.
• The solution to this is offered in terms of a discourse of
individual personal choice and decision-making. Thus,
individuals can weigh up matters about attaining a WLB
through adjusting their personal lives or the occupational
role aspects of their identity.
• There is less scope to change an occupational role than
there is to change personal circumstances and a rhetoric of
individualism ensures that the gendered nature of child care
is cloaked within a language of personal choice.
Conclusion
•
The emergence of a discourse of personal development
related to education and the workplace has intensified in
recent years.
• This may appear as a welcome development given the
fast-paced and evolving nature of the knowledge economy
and the need for a more flexible workforce capable of
keeping pace by planning and managing their own learning,
developing themselves, and managing their own career.
• Mass higher education has also come to be regarded as
an essential means of meeting the demands of the
knowledge economy.
• Students are urged to engage in PDP in order to make
themselves more adaptable and marketable through this
process.
• In tandem with this has been a concern to manage the
demands of work and family life, and again this has been
placed in the hands of the individual.
• However, this paper has agued that this largely illusory,
and that the psychologisation of these matters has
ideological effects.
• A neo-liberal discourse which stresses individual
control, planning and choice is paradoxically related to that
of the global knowledge economy requiring the need for a
greater focus on the flexibility of individuals.
• Looking outward to this global knowledge economy is
used to justify looking inward through PDP as a means of
generating our capacity to change to meet these demands.
•The implication of this is that gender divided labour
market is removed from view as a constraint upon graduate
employment, and in particular women, whose career
opportunities are, more often than not, limited in
comparison to men.
•This critique is not new in the sense that the
individualizing voluntarism of career choice discourse has
previously been examined as a normative accountable
resource (see Moir, 1993).
Ref: Moir, J. (1993) Occupational Career Choices: Accounts & Contradictions In E.
Burman & I. Parker (Eds) Discourse Analytic Research: Repertoires and Readings
of Texts in Action. London and New York: Routledge.
• What is new, however, is the way in which PDP and the
focus on employability now provides a pedagogic legitimacy
for higher education and for regulating student learning and
the development of employability skills.
• There is a hidden curriculum here and it is the way in
which the personal has become codified as the means of
success, irrespective of wider political matters such a
differential opportunities for men and women in the
employment market beyond the lecture theatre.