The sessions that took place under the general theme of “Is This My Calling? Or Just My Major?” were a new addition to the NetVUE conference offerings. Colleagues who work within similar fields from various institutions were grouped together to provide unique insight on the kinds of questions, challenges, and opportunities students in related majors have for vocational reflection. One central theme that stood out was that, even though we are all teachers of students (as opposed to teachers of disciplines), the disciplines do provide important languages for students to use and claim as they pursue futures informed by their educations.
Vocation in Departments and Schools of Business
By Jaymes Vettraino, Rochester Christian University (MI)
Business majors are whole humans with the same desires for calling and meaning as their liberal arts peers. (Of course they are!) This session explored how business schools are incorporating vocation into individual assignments, multi-discipline projects, and curriculum development to blend business and explorations of calling in meaningful ways for undergraduates. The presenters provided quick examples from their work and then asked participants to explore their own work to identify ways to incorporate vocation into their classrooms and departments. Participants brainstormed individual assignments that they could combine with explorations of calling; one excellent suggestion was to teach about corporate boards of directors while asking students to develop their personal board of mentors. They also thought about ways to develop cross-discipline projects and had great conversations about students providing valuable consulting work to the community. Finally, attendees considered times in a business curriculum for natural (or needed) reflection and how to incorporate vocational discernment into those critical times (e.g. in first-year courses, advising, and capstone courses). Business schools strive to provide students with tools and skills to make sense of the messy, complicated, overwhelming nature of organizations; how can we help students use those same tools and skills to make sense of life in a messy, complicated, overwhelming (and wonderful!) world? This both/and approach can reinforce the technical tools and skills, while opening our students to greater understandings of their own inner and outer callings.
Close Reading and Fruitful Complexity
By Ben Utter, Ouachita Baptist University (AR)
Narratives connect actions across time, imposing some order on gaps and irrationality. This can be comforting, freeing us from feelings of uncertainty and disconnection in the face of chaos and randomness. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that most students prefer stories over poetry, for most students (like most of us, let’s be honest!) don’t desire ambiguity. But life–like lyric poetry–will certainly serve it up. When students learn to read poems, as suggested in this session, they learn to read what Stephanie L. Johnson calls the “paradoxes within the texts of their own lives”—honoring life’s complexity and finding beauty and possibility there instead of mere frustration and anxiety (Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies). And because poetry, which can be hard work to write (“A line will take us hours maybe,” laments Yeats in “Adam’s Curse”), frequently explores how work relates to identity, it can be a wonderfully fruitful place to find ideas about vocation—whether capacious and hopeful or limited and misleading ones. Audre Lorde’s “Now That I Am Forever with Child,” for example, which session participants read together in groups, challenges any notions readers might have that calling concerns only the work one does for pay. And in Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath Poem X,” readers are reminded that “whatever is foreseen in joy” participates in the common good and that no one labors in isolation:
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.
Beyond Algorithms and Content: Vocation and Meaning in the Natural and Applied Sciences
By Leah A. Martin-Visscher, The King’s University (AB, Canada)
As a college student, I preferred math and science courses; there was always a “right way” to solve questions, as long as I could figure out which algorithm to use, I would get the “right” answer. There was no space for ambiguity. Now, as a chemistry college professor, I think much more about my teaching spaces and how these spaces shape the ways in which my students understand what they want to do and who they want to be. In this workshop, my colleagues in engineering and mathematics and I focused on the theme of “spaces” using three core questions: 1) Who is in our space? 2) How can we create spaces that support the development of our students’ cognitive and affective domains? and 3) how can we extend our spaces to include the co-curricular? Using a simple visual aid (the alignment grid, with certainty of major on the horizontal axis and conviction of vocation on the vertical), participants identified different types of students in their classes, and discussed how students’ perceptions of their majors and/or their callings, was often tied to their marks. Participants shared strategies that foster an awareness of both major and vocation, including using values-sorting activities, creating wandering maps or autobiographical videos, and sharing our own stories with students. Roundtable discussions revealed the challenges that participants experience in teaching to the affective domain, including not feeling properly trained, not having enough time, or doing so only spontaneously as an add-on to the regular course content. However, discussions also highlighted pedagogical and curricular approaches aimed at supporting our students’ affective domain, such as teaching from rich contexts, book studies, and art projects. Although we did not have time for a fulsome discussion of our last question, Megan Sullivan’s plenary lecture, which kickstarted the conference, reminded all of us to look beyond our classrooms and learn from—and lean into—the work being done elsewhere on our campuses to support our students as they engage with questions of purpose and meaning.