Having a long-term goal helps increase students’ engagement in learning. IN360, a community-based career exploration program adapting Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, aims to promote aspirations and learning motivations in children in rural areas. The program consists of four components: Experience, Reflect, Interact, and Practice. After providing children with a variety of working experiences through 360-degree video content in the Experience step, the Reflect component is crucial in helping children process what they learn, make meaning out of it, and connect it to their learning. Earlier implementations involving hand-drawing methods revealed that many children struggle with expressing their thoughts, often copying peers due to a lack of confidence in their drawing skills. To address this issue, the current study explores collage-making for career reflection in children, lowering the barrier of artistic skill and encouraging personal internalization.

This research views reflection from the perspective of epistemology of practice, emphasizing reflection as a meaning-making process that promotes continuous learning. Collage-making is also known to help uncover hidden thoughts and generate new insights. Prior studies using collage-making with older adults resulted in deep engagement, though the developmental stages and content differ. In both contexts, collage-making can create structured opportunities for reflection, identity expression, and peer dialogue. For older adults, this process facilitated reflection on memories and articulation. For children, it supports the construction of future narratives, including career exploration. Rooted in Dewey’s concept of experience and reflective thinking, the method acts as a visual inquiry tool that supports reflection across age groups. A 90-minute workshop is designed, covering Experience, Reflect, and Interact components, without the Practice component, as it is intended to be done at home with parents. In the Experience component, children select one video from two options provided. Then, they complete a reflection worksheet containing prompts connecting the content to their personal context. Based on their reflection, they develop personal collages themed “If I were a [profession], 10 years from now,” using pre-curated images from Pinterest, related to the session theme. In the Interact component, they presented their collage to peers.

Two workshop sessions with four elementary school children were held in Panglungan Village, Indonesia. The first group of 5th-grade students explored coffee-related careers, while the 6th-grade group explored craftsmanship. Both topics were familiar within the local context. All participants were fully engaged. They articulated their experience through writing, using the reflection worksheet. Using collage, unlike in the previous drawing-based activity, no one copied their peers, suggesting genuine self-reflection and ownership of ideas. In the sharing session, children demonstrated between level 2 (explanatory) to 3 (dialogic) on the 5-level reflection framework by Fleck and Fitzpatrick. This study highlights the potential of visual methods like collage-making to support reflective learning and aspiration-building among children. A key limitation is the use of pre-curated materials, which may have influenced the scope of expression. Future research could explore ways to expand creative freedom while maintaining relevance to career exploration themes.

Keywords: Career exploration, reflective learning, collage making, rural education, child development.