Introduction to the special section.

Every generation produces a few leaders in each profession who become giants in their field. Not necessarily recognized as such in their own time, they are frequently celebrated a generation or two later for the contributions that they earlier made. David Valentine Tiedeman (1919-2004), who is today recognized by many of the leaders of career counseling and vocational psychology as a forerunner of 21st-century career counseling, is one such giant in our field. This special section of The Career Development Quarterly honors him for the ideas that he has left with us, although he was often highly criticized or ignored at the time when he presented them.

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In his article, Mark Savickas (2008) eloquently puts Tiedeman's contributions into perspective:

When individuals of deep scholarship and intellectual daring lunge

ahead of the learned community whom they are addressing, they may

not receive the honor that they deserve. Instead, they may blend

undistinguished into the scholarly landscape and somehow become

taken for granted. Something like this has happened to the scholarly

contributions of David Valentine Tiedeman (1919-2004). Being the

first psychologist to systematically apply constructivist

epistemology to the comprehension of careers, Tiedeman broke with

intellectual traditions to lead the counseling profession in a new

direction. As he cleared a path into the future, he identified what

was to be avoided and articulated what was to be done. When others

lagged behind, he moved forward by himself. (p. 217)

The Genesis of This Special Section

The articles published in this section emerged as a result of a special symposium dedicated to honor Tiedeman and his work that was held not long after his death at the 2006 National Career Development Association (NCDA) Global Conference in Chicago. That symposium occurred as a result of a chance meeting between Mark Savickas and Lee Richmond at the NCDA conference 1 year earlier. There, Savickas and Richmond quite literally "bumped into each other" in a hotel hallway. Richmond then had the opportunity to tell Savickas how much she enjoyed the Festschrift he had been involved in planning for Donald Super. Richmond said that she wished something of that caliber could be done in honor of David Tiedeman. "David was a thinker way ahead of his time," Savickas said. "Thirty years ago, he had ideas about social construction theory and aligned it to constructing careers. Today, we think this is new when in actuality the profession is catching up with him!" Then, he suggested that because Richmond had been Tiedeman's friend, she might organize a symposium in Tiedeman's honor at the 2006 NCDA conference. Then, when Savickas offered to be the lead speaker and prepare a major presentation, Richmond started to work on creating such a session.

Martha Russell, the incoming president of NCDA, said she liked the idea. NCDA Executive Director Deneen Pennington and her staff set aside a place for the symposium. Anna Miller-Tiedeman, David's wife, named three people for the panel (in addition to Savickas) whose professional lives, she thought, were most influenced by David. The three people were JoAnn Harris-Bowlsbey, David Jepsen, and Rich Feller. All named were persons whose lives had been touched by and whose professional careers were influenced greatly by Tiedeman's work. Anna said that David had loved each of them. Moreover, each must have loved David because all immediately agreed to participate on the panel to celebrate Tiedeman, the counselor, the scholar, the teacher, and the person. With the exception of Feller, who spoke, as is characteristic of him, extemporaneously from his heart, all wrote their presentations ahead of time. These presentations form the foundation of the articles in this special section. Also included are words from Anna Miller-Tiedeman about her husband, his work, and their work and life together.

Personal Perspective

This section provides a personal insight into the person of David Tiedeman from Lee Richmond's perspective.

As panel chair, my (Richmond's) role was to introduce the others. However, as it did to each of the symposium participants, meeting David Tiedeman had its effect upon my life and changed the direction of my work. That meeting fits Tiedeman's ideas about the way that life works. It was April 1983, in Washington, DC, and, once again, the place was a convention hotel, only this time it was the American Counseling Association convention. The theme of the convention was "Counselors Help America Work," and I was program chair. The convention was planned to feature health or wellness counseling and also career development. The health topic opened the conference. The keynote speech was to be a debate between the then president of the American Medical Association (AMA) and the president of the American Holistic Medical Association. C. Gilbert Wrenn was to serve as moderator. As things worked out, there was a freak blizzard in Pittsburgh that April day, and the president of the AMA got snowed in. He phoned and said that because of the storm, his plane was delayed and he could not get to Washington in time to speak.

The program then changed. I introduced the program as a dialogue between Wrenn and Gladys McGarry. The discussion was exhilarating and forward looking and deserved the standing ovation that was given to the two speakers at the close of the session. At the end of the program, when people came to the podium to talk to the keynote speakers, a rather short man with sparkling eyes and an almost impish smile came and shook my hand. "Did you plan this program?" he asked. I told him that I had, although not exactly as it was presented. He then emphasized that it was presented exactly as it should have been. "It was perfect, the best thing I have heard at this convention in years," he said. I then asked his name. He told me that his name was David, David Tiedeman. My thought was "My god--he touched me." Before then I had read of him and of his theories only in textbooks.

I saw David again the next day, on the "career" day at the convention when many of the programs were focused on career counseling. He was on a panel planned by Carole Minor and moderated by Nancy Schlossberg. David, John Holland, John Krumboltz, and Donald Super presented their theories and demonstrated how their theories applied to the career lives of clients. All of the presentations were brilliant, but somehow I resonated to David's theory. Whereas the others talked about work and their ideas about how it is chosen, he talked about life and how career is constructed within the individual in terms of his or her sense of being, relative to other people and events that occurred in his or her life.

I wanted to learn more and told David so. He invited me to attend the 1983 Assembly to Advance Career that he and his wife, Anna Miller-Tiedeman, presented at the University of Southern California. I did attend, and, by a random selection of names, I became Anna's roommate. I have not stopped learning from them since.

Later, as I was then teaching and coordinating the counseling program at Johns Hopkins University, I invited them to come to Baltimore and teach a special course. I also attended that course and learned more about internal process theory. Students along with me included Linda Kemp, then the director of career development for the U.S. Postal Service, and Harvey Huntley, a Lutheran minister. Huntley had been chosen to design a career plan for employees relative to the national merger of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church. Kemp, Huntley, and myself all latched onto the internal process theory, the Lifecareer theory, as espoused by the two Tiedemans. Programs still exist in the postal service and in the church that were developed according to the model that was provided in that class 24 years ago.

The Lifecareer model that Anna Miller-Tiedeman had developed was heartily endorsed by David and embellished by his life process theory. The connection between spirituality and career, and the model that was developed by Deborah Bloch and myself, was sparked by the work of the two Tiedemans.

Over the years, the Tiedemans and I became friends, visiting when possible each other's homes and staying in touch by mail, phone, and e-mail as best we could. In the end, what I remember of David is that he was gentle of speech and strong of character; that he was modest; that he adored his wife, liked science fiction, and had a sense of humor equaled only by his broad and somewhat impish smile. I remember talking with him one day when I did not like something going on at the university at which I was then working. I did not know what to do. Should I speak up? Or what? I asked David. He answered with a question: "What is your job title?" I said, "Professor." He said, "Well, then, profess!"

Professional Perspectives

The articles of which this special section is composed attempt to put Tiedeman's contributions into a historical perspective. They focus especially on his early work and its application.

Mark Savickas (2008) argues convincingly that Tiedeman laid the foundation for the "contemporary theory and practice of career construction" (p. 217). He charts Tiedeman's journey from logical positivist to career constructionist.

Tiedeman's dissatisfaction with the methods of positivist psychology

impelled his quest for a new paradigm. He wanted a psychology that

did more than offer only a sum of miscellaneous facts. He wanted to