PhD in Psychology. Faculty member of the Stricto Sensu Graduate Program in Psychology at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas, Campinas-SP.

Kathleen Manion, BA, MA, LLM, PhD, is a Professor in the School of Humanitarian Studies. With a particular focus on social justice and children’s rights, Kathleen has had a diverse career working in academia, government, the not-for-profit sector and as a consultant. As such she is particularly interested in helping bridge the gap between practitioner experiential knowledge, academic theory and policy objectives in teaching, research and policy development. Kathleen’s academic, research and practice interests focus on systems that support children to thrive. Using various research methodologies and community engagement processes, Kathleen has worked on projects related to child protection, child rights, socioemotional learning, digital safety, homelessness, climate justice, early childhood development, environmental justice, service innovation, trafficking, violence against children and within families, inclusion, youth justice, and child migration in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Elizabeth Childs is interested in the design, creation and implementation of flexible learning environments that incorporate the affordances of information and communication technology (ICT) and provide learners with increased choice, flexibility and opportunities for co-creation. With expertise in educational technology & instructional design, design thinking, open education and online learning, her research interests include open educational practices and pedagogies; creation of online communities and digital habitats; design thinking and models for immersive professional development.

Ko Hikurangi te maunga Ko Waiapu te awa Ko Horouta te waka Ko Ngāti Porou te iwi I work at the intersection of entrepreneurship, education, and youth development here in Aotearoa New Zealand. I’m currently the Head of the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES) and Co-Chief Executive, where I get to work alongside thousands of young people each year as they explore ideas, build capability, and step into real-world opportunities. I didn’t set out to become an educator - in many ways, it found me - and I wouldn’t consider myself a formal educator in the traditional sense. My formal background includes an MBA from the University of Waikato and qualifications in adult education, which is where my journey began. But over time, I’ve found that working with young people is where I feel most at home. There’s something powerful about being around minds that are open, not yet shaped by what they’ve been told they can or can’t do. I don’t see myself as someone who has all the answers. My role is more about creating environments where opportunity can occur - spaces where young people can recognise that they can create their own pathways, their own futures - mana motuhake or self-determining. Alongside YES, I’ve been part of initiatives such as Kōkiri, one of Aotearoa’s first Māori business accelerators, its evolution Tupu, and Young Navigators. My work is grounded in kaupapa Māori, shaped by my Māori, Polynesian, and European heritage, and informed by what I continue to learn from the young people I work with every day.

Atsushi Okabe is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Human Studies at Seisen University, Nagano, Japan, where he specialises in career guidance, vocational education, and the comparative study of youth transitions. He holds a PhD in Education from Hokkaido University (2011). Before entering academic life, Dr. Okabe worked as a high school teacher for over twenty years (1990–2012), including a two-year placement at a Public High School in Alberta, Canada (1996–1998). This experience of Canadian schooling first sparked his interest in comparative education and vocational pathways, and laid the groundwork for what has since become a sustained programme of research on upper secondary education and work-based learning in Canada. His scholarship focuses on the institutional conditions that support young people's transitions from school to working life, with particular attention to students who face complex social, educational, or economic disadvantages. His book, Research on Transition Programmes from High School to Working Life (Kazama Shobo, 2020), examines vocational and career education across Canada and Japan. More recently, his research has turned to the role of Japan's part-time high schools (teiji-sei koukou) in supporting young people at risk of educational disengagement, a theme explored in his 2025 paper on the high school reorganisation plan in Nagano Prefecture and in a report published in the IAEVG Magazine (August 2025). Okabe is currently Principal Investigator of a JSPS-funded comparative research project (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research C, 2026–2029) examining transition support systems for vulnerable youth in Japan, Canada, and Finland. This project, which forms the basis of the present paper, involves full-scale fieldwork at part-time high schools in Japan and charter schools and guidance centres in Canada and Finland. He has been an active member of IAEVG for many years. He served on the organising committee of the IAEVG World Congress held in Japan in 2015, and has since 2015 served as Chair of the International Relations Committee of the Japanese Society for the Studies of Career Education (JSSCE). Through these roles he has developed extensive networks with researchers and practitioners in career guidance across Asia, Europe, and North America. Okabe’s work is motivated by a central conviction: that the quality of relational support between teachers and students matters more than institutional structure alone, and that small-scale, community-connected forms of schooling — however overlooked in mainstream policy — play an indispensable role in supporting young people whose paths through education have been anything but straightforward.