5.2 Finding the Signal through Story: Arts-Based Practices for Metacognitive Sense-Making at the Intersection of Career and Academic Learning

Nicole Birch-Bayley, Educational Developer, Career Exploration & Education                    
Kelci Archibald, Lead Coordinator, Career Education, Career Exploration & Education               

Amplifying the Signal: Connection, Engagement, and Civil Discourse    

Postsecondary students are asked to make sense of both their academic learning and career futures in environments saturated with competing priorities. In career education, noise often takes the form of grim labour‑market statistics, anxieties about AI, climate change, and skills gaps, and prescriptive narratives emphasizing outcomes over process. Academic learning is similarly noisy with performance pressures, unclear expectations, and accelerated timelines that leave little space to connect learning across contexts. When career and academic learning remain siloed, students are left to navigate complexity in both domains without a shared framework for sense‑making.

Recent scholarship (Bailey & Belfield, 2019; Bridgstock, Grant-Imaru, & McAlpine, 2019; Sari Camadan, & Özmen, 2025) shows how integrating career and academic learning can support students’ metacognitive development, which in turn enhances student confidence, clarity, and motivation. This workshop shares an arts‑based approach that treats metacognitive development as the signal that bridges academic and career contexts, helping students notice patterns, interpret experience, and discern what matters amid competing demands.

Participants will engage in a series of short, low‑stakes arts‑based activities (collage, creative micro-writing, crafting) that move from surfacing complexity to constructing meaning. Through these activities, participants externalize sources of "noise," observe key metacognitive moves, and make tangible the threads that support coherence across academic and career learning contexts. Each activity is followed by brief guided reflection that explicitly connects the creative process to metacognitive strategies such as noticing, choosing, connecting, prioritizing, and interpreting. Drawing on experiences from students and career educators, the session will share how these practices support engagement, reduce anxiety, and create meaningful connections across learning contexts, while highlighting inclusive, adaptable, and low‑lift applications for curricular and co‑curricular integration. The session positions arts‑based practice as a dynamic way to help students develop metacognitive strategies to connect academic and career learning, navigate uncertainty, and make intentional choices for their personal and professional trajectories.