Sessions

Join us for this unusual opportunity to be present at a live recording of the NetVUE podcast, Callings: Conversations on College, Career, and a Life Well-Lived. Our hosts will be speaking with Almeda Wright, who will also be offering the closing plenary address at the NetVUE Conference on Saturday. Audience members will have an opportunity to submit their own questions, some of which may help to shape the final edited version of this podcast episode.

NetVUE member campuses are using the NetVUE Conversation Cards in a wide range of venues: in the classroom, in co-curricular programs, and in professional development for staff and faculty members. Join this interactive workshop to explore the variety of uses for the Explore, Engage, Envision, and Encuentra decks of conversation cards. Facilitators will lead activities with the cards and will provide time for participants to share ideas and to brainstorm new uses that can be implemented on their campuses.

Campuses love to celebrate sporting achievements, and they frequently feature varsity athletes in institutional publicity, but many student-athletes live in a silo, finding themselves segregated from nonathletic peers and often less interested in questions about life after college. During this workshop, the leaders of NetVUE’s Purposeful Student-Athlete project will report preliminary findings from their study, share working models, and invite participants to reflect on the benefits and barriers to student-athlete vocational exploration on their campus.

This interactive workshop explores how generative AI is reshaping undergraduate students' approach to vocational exploration and discernment. As students increasingly navigate the tension between developing a philosophy of life and preparing for careers in a rapidly evolving professional landscape, we will examine both the opportunities and challenges AI presents for meaningful work and calling.

How might we re-envision the advising process so that it becomes a genuine opportunity for mentoring students and for encouraging them to explore and discern their vocations? In this interactive session, leaders from three NetVUE institutions will describe the ways that they have sought to strengthen and deepen the advising experience, using it to connect with students about how they understand meaning, purpose, and vocation.

In the wake of the current backlash against equity and inclusion programming, what strategies and tactics are most successful as we seek to advocate for all our students? How can we ensure that our efforts related to vocation and calling are widely available and accessible to all students, so that they reach beyond those who take it for granted as a part of the college experience? In this interactive session, participants will have the opportunity to reflect on these issues and to develop both personal and institutional strategies for student advocacy.

In this session, a contributor to one of the previous NetVUE volumes will interview editor Erin VanLaningham and four of the authors who contributed to the forthcoming fifth volume from the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project. They will delve into their process of writing, the challenges that their own institutions are facing, and their common goal of looking into the future of higher education with imagination and hope.

Join us for further conversation with keynote speaker Norman Wirzba. The first part of the session with be devoted to a facilitated conversation with Wirzba, focusing not only on the themes raised in his keynote address, but also on his writings in important texts such as Love’s Braided Dance (Yale, 2024), Agrarian Spirit (Notre Dame, 2022), and This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (Cambridge, 2021).

In this workshop, a team will present what they have learned from research and interviews about best practices in first-year programming, including what works well and what institutions might want to consider avoiding. Participants will have the opportunity to consider how they might approach vocation in their first-year programming based on the overall landscape of vocation at their institution.