Getting the Full Picture
Sunny Hansen’s Critical Task of Valuing Multiculturalism
by emilie boggis.
Before Instagram or Pinterest, we had scrapbooking. A memory was more than a single photo. It had to be. Back then, there was no automatic review of your photo. You took your best shot, waited for it to be developed, and then, more times than not, discovered that your finger was blocking the lens. A memory was a map of the terrain, a movie ticket stub, a napkin with your friends’ handwriting, a newspaper clipping, a take-out menu, a fake tattoo, a Far Side comic, and a bunch of stickers.
Our careers are also more than one headshot, said Dr. Sunny Hansen. Not unlike a page in a scrapbook that collages the fullness of our experience, Dr. Hansen applied the metaphor of a quilt to the idea of our careers and thus, career counseling. Our careers are always stitching together different pieces of fabric to create a whole. After 35 years of research in the field, Hansen challenged the field of career counseling to change its dominant framework. Workers were not one-size-fits-all, and neither were the contexts where they were living and working. We need to see workers more like a collage interlacing together differing worldviews, identities, cultural contexts, abilities, knowledge sources, options available, and barriers experienced. Dr. Hansen was pointing to the growing awareness of the multi-faceted and pluralistic nature of the world, our society and social context. This was Dr. Hansen’s fourth Critical Task: to value pluralism and inclusivity.
Consider for your own career path:
What parts of your journey have been different from what is considered the “normal” trajectory for your discipline?
What aspects of your identity seem “outside” who is typically “seen” in your role?
How do your primary contexts and cultures inform your work ethic and understanding of leadership and teamwork?
Now, consider the career path of the late Rev. Dr. Lamar Hardwick. As a child of a pastor and military father in the 1980s and ’90s, the regular rituals of churches provided comfort to a family frequently on the move. That combination of comfort in a chaotic world would inform his career.
As an adult after discerning a call to ministry, Dr. Hardwick’s life seemed to follow the prescribed training: divinity schools and serving churches. Then, Dr. Hardwick was diagnosed with autism at the age of 37, realizing “for the first time I understood I was human.” He began to learn about neurological differences and how his own differences informed his identity as a Black man and his role as pastor of a congregation. It changed how he led, transforming his church into communities where neurological differences are viewed as gifts to the community rather than deficits to be managed. How could churches, Dr. Hardwick wondered, better welcome people on the spectrum and create changes to their buildings and practices that would prioritize people with disabilities in general? Under Dr. Hardwick’s leadership, the work of the church was to provide sanctuaries of comfort in a discomforting world. Through his work, Dr. Hardwick was practicing Dr. Sunny Hansen’s 4th critical task.
In our day-to-day work, Dr. Hansen advocated that we need to value “otherness,” our own and one another’s. Indeed, she asserted that it was a lifelong task to receive difference as a gift. Rather than simply learning facts about people who are different from “the norm,” Hansen’s model has an implicit assumption that growth comes through encounter. As Lamar Hardwick learned, encountering difference transforms how we understand ourselves and the people we serve.
To encounter the fullness of your own journey, we offer this collage exercise:
Make space on a table to transform your singular headshot into a collage.
On a large empty poster board, place a photo that you frequently use for your work. Place it in the center of the poster board.
Now, in pencil, draw a spiral timeline out from the photo and circle around multiple times.
Reflect on your career journey. Consider:
The background: How did your upbringing inform your view of work and career?
The facts: the actual jobs, years, what was happening in the world, etc.
The dreams: What were your aspirations?
What was the landscape?
What challenges did you meet? How did they shape your worldview?
What did you lament? What did you lose?
Where did you get stuck? What options felt available? Where did you get free?
What new and/or different parts of your identity and/or career did you discover?
Who were the people & communities that made a difference (for better or worse)?
What lessons did you learn? What lessons do you keep learning?
You can spend time journaling on these questions, as you wish.
Find images and symbols for each of these answers and phases of your life: photos, magazine pictures, comics, newspaper clippings, words, postcards, fragments of maps, ticket stubs, take-out menus, etc. You might find them in files or boxes from that time. Our guidance: Instead of looking for a specific image, let the image or symbol choose you.
Trim the clippings into shapes and start weaving them together onto the spiral. You can cover the entire poster board or leave space to glimpse the spiral. Up to you!
Once all of the pieces are in place, take a step back and view your patchwork career as a whole. What do you notice? What do you wonder? What do you realize?
When you are finished with your collage, take a new “headshot photo.” Ta da! Welcome to Dr. Hansen’s critical task 4! This is also a great exercise to do with a group or team with a period of invitational sharing afterward where you encounter one another more fully and embrace one another’s differences.
