E-Portfolio: a bridge between life project and university choice

Abstract

In the Italian education system students must choose how to continue their studies when they finish compulsory education and when they decide to enrol at university. Our work focuses on the choice of the university course and, in particular, on the guidance that students receive in order to make this important decision, which will have a major impact on their future life. Drawing on Bruner's Narrative Psychology and Savickas' Life Design model, we hypothesised that the choice of a course of study should be linked to a wider life project and to personal identity, not least to lay the foundations for a truly decent job. We assumed that to make this connection students would need narrative and individualised tools that could help them see the trajectory of their self from past to future, and that one of these tools could be the e-portfolio. We therefore offered a narrative university orientation, integrated with the possibility of creating an e-portfolio, to a group of nearly 30 Sicilian high school students, with the intention of comparing their results with those of students who had only received a "traditional" orientation, usually consisting of group activities, information days, open days and, more recently, work-school alternation. In this article we will present the reference model, the tools we used and the analyses on this group, which show that young people need more individual support in their orientation, starting from middle school.