Career Dream Drawings: Children’s Visions of Professions in Future Workscapes

This article highlights career dream drawings as a tool for language arts teachers to learn more about children’s professional aspirations. I first situate the concept of career dreams in relation to literacy, identity, and multimodality. From this sociocultural frame, career dream drawings are visual renderings of the professional identities, artifacts, and literacies that children envision taking up in future “workscapes” as adults. Next, I focus on the career dream drawings created by 37 children in a university-sponsored summer reading clinic, illustrating how the career dream drawings served as multimodal spaces where children could imagine themselves as future professionals effectively using particular literacies and tools in a variety of imagined workplaces. Finally, I conclude the article with lessons that language arts educators can learn from examining children’s career dream drawings.