Eco-values in career guidance for 9th-grade students: A practical case study from Portugal
Based on implementation by Sofia Dias, School Psychologist, Vila Nova de Gaia
Tools used in this case study (adapted for the target group and the context):
Introduction
Young people increasingly express concern about climate change, social justice, and sustainability, but these values often remain disconnected from their educational and career planning. This case study explores how Green Guidance principles were integrated into standard vocational orientation activities with 9th-grade students in Portugal. The fundamental question guiding this work was: how do we help young people connect who they are with what kind of world they want to build through their life choices?
Context and rationale
The intervention took place in a public school in Vila Nova de Gaia, involving 179 students across six classes. These 14 to 15-year-olds stand at a critical inflection point in their educational journey – the end of basic education when pressure mounts to choose secondary education pathways. This decision carries significant weight and is frequently experienced with ambivalence, insecurity, and an increased need for self-knowledge.
I noticed that over several years of practice, students demonstrated growing interest in environmental issues, responsible consumption, and sustainable lifestyles, yet this awareness rarely translated into their reflections about academic or professional futures. This gap between personal concern and vocational decision-making aligns with findings in recent literature on career development, which suggests that contemporary youth care deeply about planetary futures but lack structured support to channel that concern into meaningful career planning. I decided to test Green Guidance within existing vocational intervention programming, rather than creating additional burdens on already-crowded school schedules and to enrich the existing intervention with dimensions increasingly relevant to current generations: ecological consciousness, social responsibility, and understanding the impact of individual choices on collective futures.
Three components of the intervention
The intervention focused on three essential components drawn from Green Guidance methodology. The first involved reflection on significant moments, using emotional connection as an entry point for value identification. Rather than asking abstract questions about what matters most to them, students explored positive experiences that had shaped them naturally, allowing values to surface organically from lived reality.
The second component introduced eco-values explicitly alongside traditional personal values. This broadened the scope of reflection beyond individual wellbeing to include collective impact – environmental stewardship, responsibility toward others, intergenerational fairness, and contribution to the common good. For many students, this was the first time environmental concerns were framed not as separate from career planning but as integral to it.
The third component connected these values to concrete future decisions. Students reviewed their existing career objectives against their newly constructed value hierarchies, examining whether coherence existed between what they claimed to value and where they intended to direct their energy and time.
Session implementation
The ninety-minute session unfolded in distinct phases designed to build progressively from awareness to integration. It began with an opening discussion establishing what values are, why they matter in daily decision-making. This framing was important as it prevented eco-values from appearing as foreign additions rather than natural extensions of existing moral and ethical concerns students already held.
A short video covering themes of authenticity, life choices, purpose, and individual action consequences was then presented. Following viewing, guided debate invited students to articulate what messages they perceived, which values appeared within the content, and how those same values might influence their own decisions. This transition from external observation to personal application helped normalize the conversation around sustainability as relevant to their future career.
The core activity involved constructing personal values pyramids. From a prepared list containing both traditional personal values and eco-values, students selected ten most significant to them and arranged them hierarchically. They could also add personally relevant values not present on the original list. This task emphasized recognizing which values form the foundation of self-concept and can guide future decisions. Some students initially struggled here, particularly distinguishing between values they admired in theory versus those genuinely guiding their behavior.
Pair work followed, asking students to identify five situations – lived or imagined – that reflected behaviors aligned with their chosen values. This phase encouraged looking beyond purely personal circumstances to include civic participation, environmental connection, and sustainable actions. By grounding abstract values in concrete scenarios, students operationalized what it might actually mean to live according to their stated priorities.
In the final individual reflection, students returned to their “arrow of the 5 career objectives” constructed in previous session and analyzed alignment or misalignment with their newly articulated value pyramids. This moment of assessment was powerful, because several recognized discrepancies between aspirational goals and underlying motivational structures, prompting immediate reconsideration of certain pathways.
The session concluded with small-group sharing, building collaborative pyramids that incorporated at least two eco-values from each member. This communal dimension reinforced that sustainability is inherently collective even as it emerges from personal choice.
Observed Impact
Engagement levels throughout the session exceeded expectations. Particularly striking was student curiosity during the initial Green Guidance framing. The video selection successfully captured attention and generated real interest in subsequent debate. Construction of the values pyramid received warm reception overall, with most students engaging introspectively while demonstrating enthusiasm for sharing choices and reflections in pairs and small groups. The group collaboration aspect proved valuable: Watching students negotiate differences in priority, find common ground, and create unified representations revealed dynamics that individual work alone would not have surfaced.
Impact became clearest during final reflection phases, where many students identified essential values previously unarticulated, including ecological concerns like environmental responsibility, solidarity, and community care. Small-group work strengthened social awareness and allowed recognition that personal decisions carry broader repercussions. Reviewing career objectives against values produced greater coherence between stated intentions and underlying priorities, encouraging goal reformulation aligned with both personal meaning and sustainability considerations.
Challenges encountered
At the student level, some difficulty surfaced around identifying and hierarchizing eco-values. These concepts often remained more abstract than personal values, with fewer direct everyday reference points. Environmental responsibility or intergenerational solidarity can feel distant to adolescents whose primary spheres of experience involve family, friends, and school rather than policy, systems, or global trends. Reluctance to share personal reflections also appeared, particularly among introverted students. Deep value exploration requires psychological safety and trust that does not automatically exist in every classroom environment. it is important to create conditions where intimate self-disclosure feels permissible without risk of judgment.
At the practitioner level, balancing individualized guidance with whole-group pacing was not always easy. Ensuring each student could reflect sufficiently on their values without sacrificing program flow and language adaptation proved also demanding. Terms like “intergenerational solidarity” or “community impact” necessitated translation into language and examples accessible to fourteen-year-olds. Perhaps the most persistent challenge was respecting time constraints.
Recommendations for practitioners considering integration
- Before launching into implementation, take time to prepare concrete eco-value examples rooted in student daily lives. Recycling habits, transportation choices, food consumption patterns can become gateways to larger conversations when properly framed and also allow to connect the abstract notion of environmental responsibility to the concrete life.
- Allocate sufficient individual reflection time before initiating any group sharing. Introverted students especially need preparation periods, rushing this sequence undermines the depth of engagement you hope to achieve.
- Build explicit psychological safety into your facilitation approach. Values work touches identity and without clear establishment of trust, respect, and confidentiality, students will not open.
- During sessions, prioritize small-group formats before whole-class presentation. Pairs or trios increase confidence and allow deeper discussion.
- Document outcomes systematically wherever possible to build evidence base around Green Guidance effectiveness across different contexts to strengthen the field and helps justify resource allocation that can transform our sector.
- Maintain critical self-awareness about structural dimensions – tools focused on personal values and meaning-making work well, actively complement them with opportunities to explore systemic conditions and develop critical awareness around current economic model and the need for collective action. It is important to not frame sustainability solely as individual responsibility.