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.