By Kari Kloos
NetVUE Grant Program Officer and Interim Vice President for Mission and Professor of Religious Studies, Regis University
In the fall semester of 2020—the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic—I struggled to teach my undergraduate class, titled Vocation, Faith, and Love. At first, my struggles were technical: how to set up a complicated, multi-device system for streaming (swiveling robot, iPad, microphones, speakers) that confounded even our technology experts; how to encourage student connection in a hybrid format; how to hear the quiet students wearing masks that muffled their voices. Slowly, though, I realized that I needed to make a deeper, more fundamental change.
As I was talking with students about the lofty ideals of vocation and discerning their callings, they were simply trying to survive in a period of upheaval and uncertainty. I realized that I needed to shift my goals and focus on more immediate priorities. During the pandemic, I came to see that we all needed a different vision and skills to thrive in times of uncertainty. I refined this vision over the next two offerings of the course, asking students to become comfortable with not knowing how to answer the question: what are you going to do after graduation? Instead, I asked them: what do you value about yourself? What are you unlearning? What practices and skills have helped you get through difficult times before? What sustains you in times of struggle?
Five years later, I have continued to follow this shift in the classroom. More recently, however, I have realized that it also applies to my work as a university administrator. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed, and to fear the future, amid the upheaval and uncertainty facing higher education. The daily work that is necessary to survive can take precedence over the more expansive care that we need to thrive. We might even find ourselves grieving the loss of older visions for our institutions.
I have found it helpful in these situations to ask similar questions to those I asked in my course: what do we value about our institution, and how can we continue to cultivate these values? What are we unlearning, so that we can let go of whatever is no longer serving its purpose? What practices and skills have helped us get through difficult times in the past, and how might we practice them now? What sustains us in times of struggle—whether it is finding joy in everyday work, strengthening collegial relationships, increasing contact with students, or celebrating small successes? Perhaps, through our search for answers to these questions, we open ourselves to discerning the next steps toward an unknown future, and to providing ourselves with a greater capacity to flourish.
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