The NetVUE Blog
Vocation Matters
Readers looking for accessible and meaningful resources that reflect the latest insights on vocational exploration from colleagues across the network will find several recent posts on Vocation Matters well worth their time. In the past few months, NetVUE’s blog has featured writers who have started new series, while others have continued or concluded theirs.
- Jennifer West and Julianne Sandberg, both faculty members at Samford University (AL), each launched a new series. In the first post in West’s series on the attention gym, she makes a case for educators “to help their students develop their attentive faculties,” using classroom activities and course assignments to strengthen their cognitive fitness and focus—qualities that are essential for living vocationally. In her second post, West focuses on the importance of listening for vocational exploration and how to teach students to do it better.
- Sandberg explores the power of Shakespeare to help students navigate ambiguity in their callings. In her first post, she reflects on teaching Shakespeare as vocational formation, and in her second, she describes a student’s encounter with A Merchant in Venice and the struggle to make meaning of Shakespeare’s stereotypical representation and simultaneous humanization of Shylock.
- In another new series on vocation and intentional communities, Abby Rampone profiles alums of four different models of communal living, sharing their stories and the impact such programs had on their vocational discernment.
- Amy Patterson at Sewanee: The University of the South (TN) and Heather Brady, along with Erin Olsen-Telles, both at Grand View University (IA), concluded their series on the role that community-engaged learning plays in vocational exploration with “Assessing Community-Engaged Learning to Deepen Vocational Reflection.” This post provides readers with some helpful examples on ways to strengthen assignment design and assessment strategies so that students better understand the connections between their work in communities and their own emerging vocations.
- Carrie Caudill at Newberry College (SC) continued her series, using Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” as a point of departure for her post on wandering as a vocational practice. In it, she recommends walking in nature as a way to create the conditions necessary for deep reflection.
- In “A Victory for Humanity: Vocation, AI, and Magnifica Humanitas,” Caryn Riswold, NetVUE senior consultant, celebrates Pope Leo’s first encyclical for the way it centers “humanity” and focuses on “what it means to be human.”
- Finally, Justin Klassen’s remembrance of Wendell Berry offers a moving tribute to a writer that was beloved by many colleagues at NetVUE member institutions and by those readers who care deeply about vocation. Writing about Berry, Klassen reflects, “He reminds us that to live is to be a creature responsible and responsive to creation, and to be part of communities that are worthy of our affection and care.”
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