If you have not already read the general guidelines for using the topical guides, please begin here. As a reminder, these guides are intended to stir your initial thinking, not offer comprehensive guidance. We encourage you to explore the questions and resources in this guide with at least one other person on your campus.
Introduction
General education (“gen ed”) courses are often referred to as the core curriculum and define either a set of courses or types of courses that all students, regardless of major, are required to complete in order to graduate. The general education curriculum is designed to give students interdisciplinary breadth and to cultivate key skills in critical thinking and effective communication. Colleges and universities often connect their general education requirements to their mission, emphasizing the ways that a broad, integrated education can equip students to engage in questions of meaning, purpose, service, and citizenship. An institution’s general education curriculum can therefore be a natural place to integrate vocational frameworks and programming.
Some institutions require their students to complete their general education courses in the first two years of coursework (designating the final two years for specialized major courses), while other institutions have designed a general education curriculum that extends across the student’s four-year degree. Vocation programs can work within both models, although four-year models provide greater opportunity for students to continually reflect on how their disciplinary formation, along with their gen ed courses, are equipping them to develop their gifts and skills, discern their values, and begin to craft a life of meaning and purpose oriented toward the common good.
Questions to Consider
- What is your institution’s general education model, and what are its guiding principles and ultimate aims?
- What is the relationship between your general education and your institution’s stated mission? If this is not explicitly stated, consider placing the gen ed curriculum and the mission side-by-side and noticing connections or gaps.
- What courses in your general education seem like natural places to pilot the incorporation of a vocational framework or vocation activities or assignments?
Resources
Blog Post
Renewing General Education for Vocation’s Sake
by Cynthia A. Wells
This piece invites institutions to view general education as an essential infrastructure for vocational formation and suggests how it can be intentionally designed to help students engage questions of meaning, purpose, and responsibility. Specifically, it examines a hybrid first-year seminar model that situates vocational reflection within disciplinary inquiry, embedding vocation into the intellectual fabric of the curriculum rather than treating it as an add-on.
Blog Post
Design Thinking for Vocation-Related Programming
by Kim Garza
This post presents design thinking as a practical methodology for scaling vocational exploration initiatives by centering empathy, collaboration, and iterative experimentation. Rather than relying on persuasion alone, vocational leaders can engage faculty and campus partners as co-creators, developing contextually responsive programs that naturally extend vocational reflection into new curricular and co-curricular spaces. The approach offers a pathway toward broader institutional integration grounded in shared ownership.
Podcast Episode
On Wicked Teaching
with Paul Hanstedt
Part of our call as educators is to prepare students for a dynamic and complicated world. Hanstedt, author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, helps us understand how vocation and pedagogy intersect. This conversation explores reflective practices, questioning, and listening in the classroom. He offers ways to disrupt patterns and discover fresh approaches for collaborative learning and exploration. Handstedt’s emphasis on preparing students for the difficulties of life—and engaging in big questions from the first semester through the last—ultimately challenges us to ask students, “what matters?”
Example Activities
Below are two activities that help students reflect on the meaning of the general education requirements. These activities are meant to be examples to spark thinking about what might be possible in your classroom and setting. They could be used on their own, or with some careful organization and tracking, they could be implemented as bookends of the student formation experience.
Reflection (early year)
This can be a written essay or a letter to self, or it can be a topic of small or large group discussion. Consider giving students this prompt alongside your institution’s general education requirements and possibly your institutional mission:
Philosopher Wendy Brown asks the question, “What kind of world do you want to live in?” She follows up by wondering, “What do we need to know and think about, hence to study, in order to address” the challenges and complexities of today’s world?
First, reflect on what kind of world you want to live in. Describe its qualities. Then consider what sorts of knowledge will support you in becoming a person who can help shape that world, perhaps through your career or job but also beyond it. Look at [the college’s] general education requirements: What courses look like they might help you develop your “world shaping” skills? What questions or hopes would you take into your required courses?
Reflection (later year)
This can be used in class or out of class as a writing assignment, or can be a topic of small or large group discussion.
Letter to Past Self:
Write a letter to your first-year-of-college self. In this letter, talk about at least two gen ed courses you “had” to take that you were not sure about at first, but that ended up being meaningful to you in some way. What surprised you about those courses? What did you learn or discover about the material, about yourself, and about the world around you? In addition to telling your former self what you discovered, give them some advice on the best ways to approach gen ed courses so that they get the most out of them.
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