DICO Toolkit for Digital Career Stories

Abstract

Digital Career Stories – Opening new career paths for arts and culture students, or DICO for short, has been a 2-year-long pedagogical development project. Its main objective was to develop innovative narrative and arts- and design-based methods that together form the Digital Career Story methodology introduced in this toolkit. Through the methodology developed, the project aimed to encourage reflection and self-reflection skills in higher education students, along with their digital and creative skills, and to help them build professional identities and design career paths, as well as enhancing their resilience, self-efficacy and self-esteem. The specific target group of the project was students of arts and culture subjects, but the pedagogical methods can just as well be used with other higher education students. The DICO project was the joint effort of a consortium of five European universities: Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS), Finland (as the applicant and coordinator of the project), University of Macerata (UniMC), Italy, Staffordshire University (SU), United Kingdom, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), Hungary, and the Technical University of Dublin (TU Dublin), Ireland. The project was funded by the Erasmus+ programme and lasted from March 2021 to February 2023.

The DICO Toolkit contains the project results in the form of a handbook intended for lecturers, counsellors and mentors in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), and for cultural and creative organisations and professionals. It aims to provide both theoretical frameworks and practical tools for developing art-based methodologies with HEI students in the arts and culture. The book is structured into three sections – Theories and methodologies, Implementing creative methods, and Project evaluation and further resources – and concludes with an Appendix.