Social Inclusion of Students from Disadvantaged Backgrounds: New Strategic Approaches to Educational Counselling and Communication

The need to provide education for all has continued to be at a high level even now when access to education is easier and considerably wider than in the previous historical periods. There is a general causality as well as a specific one supporting this necessity. The latter includes an additional set of reasons which connect defining characteristics of disadvantaged learners with the limitations of the pandemic crisis and its effects on communication. They also continue to manifest themselves after the health restrictions have been lifted and further hinder communication and educational counselling, thereby imposing additional barriers to inclusive education. This study is a literature review through which we aim to make a synthesis of current communication and educational counselling new strategic approaches suitable for use in the post - COVID context for facilitating access to education for disadvantaged students. The objectives of the study are as follows: O1: to identify a set of strategies which correspond to the specific communication pattern and information needs of the children and teenagers nowadays;O2: to identify current educational counselling strategies which can be successfully used in the post -COVID context to enable well-informed career decisions for disadvantaged students;O3: to develop a formative intervention model for social inclusion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The study findings may be useful in school and career counselling in pre-university education, but also in collaborative approaches between pre-university and academia in order to facilitate the inclusion of the disadvantaged students.

Making Career Decisions in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic. An Analysis of Disadvantaged Student Groups

The educational area is a social sector where the COVID-19 pandemic impact involves making many exponential changes. In many countries, the transition from face-to-face education to on-line education implies a revolution in the hierarchy of job domains/jobs offer. Young people's career plans may be different under the impact of internal and external factors generated by this new context. Theoretical framework revealed that under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the career decision-making process becomes more difficult to assume by taking into consideration the job nature, the sense of belonging, and the balance between passions and risks involved. By referring to these aspects a question arises: Will the pandemic also create a crisis in the career-making decision process for young people? The research group consisted of 108 undergraduates' from 12 grades, attending high schools from cities under 10,000 inhabitants. Hypothesis: There is a tendency to focus on training areas dominated by the practical aspects than the theoretical one as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We used a Romanian adapted version of the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Questionnaire used in counseling and carrier orientation services for identification of professional interests of the students. The obtained results show that it is important for high school students to receive quality services for carrier guidance and psycho-educational support to prevent over-introversion and over-critical attitude about others and themselves, self-isolation correlated with a high level of sensing and sensitiveness.