Explainer: Why are positive STEM role models important?
Can you remember back to when you were young? Really young. To that time in your life when people would ask you the question ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’
Your ability to answer the question, and the scope of the answer you could have provided, would have been dependent upon your younger self’s knowledge and awareness of careers you could potentially pursue.
In other words, to paraphrase the adage ‘you can become what you can see’… ‘You can decide to follow a career only when you know that that career exists’.
This might explain why so many children report wanting to work in roles where people wear uniforms. The visibility of the uniform defines the role and communicates to young people that this is a potential role they could one day wear the uniform of. These career roles are the ones that the child has become familiar with through the books that their teachers, parents, or a loving aunt read to them. Or, through their interaction with people in these careers in real life.
Ideas about potential careers the child could pursue are also formed by what children watch on screen, which might explain the percentage of children aspiring towards the careers of ‘space pilot’, and ‘rock star influencer’.
One explanation for this idea of being able to pursue careers that are visible to you comes out of the work of three researchers: Lent, Brown, and Hackett. In 1994, they published an academic paper explaining what is now known as Social Cognitive Career Theory. This theory is based on the work of Bandura’s General Social Cognitive Theory. If you’d like to read more about their work, there are some links to additional resources at the bottom of the page.
According to Social Cognitive Career Theory, there are three dimensions that contribute to career development. The first is a belief in yourself (referred to as ‘self-efficacy’) i.e. that you can navigate your way into the career and perform at the role once there. The second is the outcomes you expect to obtain through pursuing the career – which can be formed by observing the people in those roles and seeing what their lives are like. And the third is setting the goal to follow that career pathway.
According to this theory, the belief that you could follow any given career is tied to the idea that you can see, or have knowledge of, other people who have made that career into a reality.
Being able to identify with the person who holds that career is key. The more they are like you, the more likely it is you could imagine yourself in the role.
The more a child can relate to the person with the career the more likely they are to feel like that career is an option for them too.
This is why in our STEM Storytime series, we ask the STEM professionals to take us back to their childhoods so that when children are listening to the story they can potentially relate their own childhood experiences with the STEM professionals in the story. Through that connection, a bridge can then be built in the child’s mind between where the child is now and an imagined future self.
As an example, children who can connect with the experience of finding bugs as fascinating creatures might connect with the story of Suzie Reichman, who, as she explains when sharing her career story as part of the STEM Storytime series, turned her love of bugs into a career as an environmental scientist and later helped address issues of pollution and turn old mine sites back into the landscape.
But on the flip side, when negative career models are seen by children – the ones, for example, that reinforce negative gender stereotypes – these can create a barrier to imagining a future self in that career, and therefore the child can dismiss the career from their conscious or unconscious list of available career options.
The power of Cognitive Career Theory is one of the reasons that the Primary + STEM website shares many stories of women who turned their childhood passions and curiosities into careers in STEM through our STEM Storytime series.
One of the key benefits of sharing STEM Stories with children is to reveal to them a range of careers they might never have known existed. Additionally, the stories can show children – of any gender – that these careers are possible.
Additional resources:
A short video introducing you to Social Cognitive Career Theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDlAePs7uU
Learn more about Social Cognitive Career Theory: https://career.iresearchnet.com/career-development/social-cognitive-career-theory/
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