The DICO project has now finished and its major output, The DICO Toolkit for Digital Career Stories, can be downloaded in full from
https://riviste.unimc.it/index.php/cap-cult/issue/view/148
Digital Career Stories aims to open new career paths for arts, culture, and creative industry students by developing and piloting an online methodology of Digital Career Stories. The methodology will be used to support students’ professional growth, identity work, reflection skills, self-awareness, self-efficacy and resilience through creative and reflective activities.
The DICO consortium will develop and pilot innovative art-based and narrative methods in four Intellectual Outputs that together form the Digital Career Story methodology:
– writing reflective diary,
– digital storytelling,
– performative embodied identities and
– design thinking.
What has originally been implemented as fully hands-on and face-to-face workshops will now be turned into an interactive online learning process.
In all HEIs the Digital Career Stories methods will be piloted with variety of Master’s Degree CCS students. Methodology will be used for self-reflection and sharing experiences among students. Moreover, students will be involved in international interaction and collaboration on digital platforms.
The main result of the project is the Digital Career Story methodology that can be implemented fully online and adapted for various study programmes, also outside the creative and cultural sectors. The project will produce an online toolkit to disseminate the methodology widely in the higher education sector.
| Field Culture Project duration 1.3.2021 – 28.2.2023 Partners – Turku AMK, Finland (lead) – Universita Degli Studi di Macerata – Staffordshire University – Moholy-Nagy Muveszeti Egyetem – Technological University Dublin | Total funding 270 611 € Staffordshire University Budget 58 966 € Contact Information – Assoc. Prof Rob Marsden – Prof Carola Boehm – Link at Turku AMK (FI) (Lead) – Link at Universita Degli Studi di Macerata (IT) |
DICO is a ERASMUS+ project running from 2021 – 2023 that will produce online tools, which graduates can utilise to enhance their professional identity, improve their digital expertise in traditionally non-digital fields and present themselves in the job market. The project will turn students and graduates into CCS professionals with flexible career plans and innovative thinking in their careers and with creative mindset in terms of finding new ways to work and create job opportunities. Both students and lecturers will obtain better online working skills after participating in Digital Career Stories.
DICO Objectives
- Boosting arts, culture, and creative industry students’ resilience and belief in their future by inspiring them to rethink their possibilities and career strengths through digitally supported professional self-reflection.
- Providing piloted and researched Digital Career Story method to the use of art and culture lecturers who traditionally work with concrete hands-on methods in intimate workshop environments.
- Enabling internationalisation, networking and online skills of art and culture students through collaborative digital reflection and career story workshops in the time where traditional student exchange mobility is not possible.
- Intensifying the collaboration of the participating educational organisations in the field of pedagogical art and media based online methods.
Expected Impact
DICO produces online tools, which the graduates can utilise to enhance their professional identity, improve their digital expertise in traditionally non-digital fields and present themselves in the job market. The project will turn students and graduates into CCS professionals with flexible career plans and innovative thinking in their careers and with creative mindset in terms of finding new ways to work and create job opportunities. Both students and lecturers will obtain better online working skills after participating in Digital Career Stories.
European added value of DICO: In DICO, the intimate workshop environment is transferred into the digital international sphere. The project’s partners will bring in their own innovative interventions to teach the students new tools of reflecting their skills and expertise and show them how their work around arts and culture form a valuable professional identity.
Digital Career Story is a narrative tool to be utilised in current European transnational labour market navigation for graduating students in CCS. Students need flexible digital tools and skills of reflection to be able to recognise their career strengths to communicate their professionalism to themselves and to their networks and potential employers in Europe.
Planned outcomes
Digital Career Story is a narrative tool to be utilised in current European transnational labour market navigation for graduating students in CCS. Students need flexible digital tools and skills of reflection to be able to recognise their career strengths to communicate their professionalism to themselves and to their networks and potential employers in Europe.
- Methodology that adapts originally hands-on face to face process to digital version that can be fully implemented online.
- Instructions, recommendations and materials for other lecturers in art and culture education who are interested to try out the new methodology with their students. With adaptations there is no reason why the methodology would not be suitable for other field of study as well. The need for effective digital support for the development of professional identity of graduating students is not dependent on the educational field of study. The material encourages lecturers to try outs with their own student groups.
- Digital Career Stories produced: Students have the freedom to decide, how they are sharing and using their stories. The story can remain as personal tool for self-reflection and professional boosting, not shared to anybody else, if the student wishes so. Those stories that are shared, for example for professional purposes, are also presented as results from the project. They are the core result of the long process of autobiographical career self-reflection, but at the same time they serve as result examples and PR material for the project methodology.
- Compiled documentation, experiences and analysis of the workshops and pilots in form of a co-edited online Toolkit for Digital Career Stories.
Other expected results of DICO are:
- Digital Career Stories produced
- Adopted new methodology by lecturers teaching professional identity and providing career counselling
- improved professional self-esteem and better understanding of their learned skills by participating MA students
- Improved digital skills of CCS lecturers in participating HEIs.
The international online adaptation of the Digital Career Story method and the supporting toolkit with materials and recommendations enables the exploitation in other HEIs throughout Europe, since the implementation does not require any expensive platforms.
The TEAM and its own digital identities
