Lives on file: a critical assessment of the career portfolio genre

This article examines the ideological dimensions of the career portfolio. This genre, an increasingly common part of high school and post-secondary school curricula, invites students to collect items from multiple domains and to reflect upon what these items say about who they are and where they are going. Through a critical analysis of the primary instructional form used in one school's career portfolio program, this article describes how the genre calls students to present themselves as certain kinds of people inhabiting certain kinds of worlds. More specifically, it is argued the genre prompts students to individualize themselves and endorse in their portfolios a middle-class ideology of self-cultivation and self-promotion.