Building Connections and Community through NetVUE’s Big Read

NetVUE’s Big Read program promotes connections among educators, students, and communities in higher education by focusing on vocational exploration. This year features Norman Wirzba’s “Love’s Braided Dance” as a catalyst for meaningful discussions on hope and community building. The program includes webinars and resources to enhance campus engagement.

One of the greatest gifts of working in higher education is the opportunity to connect: with students, with colleagues, and with community. Educators focus on such connection throughout the academic year—as students learn and grow through all aspects of their undergraduate experience. The Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) hosts an annual Big Read program, which offers member institutions a significant way to deepen connection around our common purpose of helping students discern their callings and lead meaningful lives, while helping us connect with each other on our campuses.

The Big Read is a way for campus leaders to invite others into conversations about vocation and to cultivate expertise in vocational exploration across campus and within different parts of the undergraduate experience. The program provides an opportunity to engage with NetVUE resources, including this blog, the podcast Callings, the scholarship of vocation, and Studies in Vocation and Calling, NetVUE’s new journal. It can bring fresh and challenging ideas to the ways you might be thinking about vocation. It also can build meaningful connections and community, helping seasoned and new colleagues—faculty members, staff, and administrators—forge a common purpose. Reading can be, as I’ve written elsewhere, a “catalyst for considering and contributing to collective well-being.”

This year’s Big Read selection in Norman Wirzba’s Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. The book invites all of us to think about the ways we are connected and empowered to create a “welcoming and nurturing community in which people can dream, explore, and develop the potential that is uniquely theirs.” The book draws from science, literature, theology, personal storytelling, and history as it explores finding hope through action.

On September 16, NetVUE will kick off this year’s Big Read with its first webinar, which will feature the book’s author, Norman Wirzba, as he reflects on its major themes. Later in the fall, a webinar in November will host a panel that includes a theologian and an environmental scientist, who will discuss different disciplinary facets of the book. In the spring, a third webinar will explore vocational narratives from the perspective of science, literature, and art. (These webinars are all open to any individual who works at a NetVUE institution, but you do have to register to be able to attend them.) NetVUE member institutions that plan to read the book in a group setting can receive up to 20 copies at no cost.

Do you work at a NetVUE institution? Interested in bringing the Big Read to your campus? Gather a few colleagues, and—in consultation with your NetVUE Campus Contact—consider the ways a Big Read experience could work in your context. In past years, NetVUE institutions have adopted several different approaches for their Big Read programming. One institution’s president has drawn upon its history and traditions and with the director of its center for vocation, co-hosting a series of “small chats” or discussions with participants. Another institution discovered a great hunger among its staff for reflective conversation and focused its attention on this group, creating a cohort for them to read and reflect together. Others sponsored more traditional reading groups comprising faculty members that met fairly frequently—every few weeks—to discuss the book, chapter by chapter. One campus brought the author of last year’s Big Read into the conversation and hosted her on Zoom for its final meeting. In whatever way you might proceed, rest assured that engaging in the program offers much to your campus. As one institution reported, “the participants remarked on how nice it was to gather—not just for the food but also the uplifting and hopeful conversations. The discussions were a place where frustrations, fears and more could be shared. Yet, the chapters kept the conversations aimed toward hope and possibilities.”

“The discussions were a place where frustrations, fears and more could be shared. Yet, the chapters kept the conversations aimed toward hope and possibilities.”

You don’t have to develop your approach alone. NetVUE offers some key resources to support your work. Members of the staff have prepared a discussion guide to help leaders work through the book, no matter your experience or expertise. If you are planning to come to the one of the NetVUE Regional Gatherings in September or February, you could attend a free pre-conference workshop about leading and launching the Big Read on your campus. The sequence of webinars (described above) can connect your campus conversation to others across our network. Finally, this blog will feature a series of posts designed to prompt disciplinary conversations and personal reflection.

This is the fifth year of NetVUE’s Big Read program; if you believe that an earlier selection would fit better in your context, you can also participate in the program using one of the previous Big Read books.

NetVUE’s hope for you and your campus is that this program invites you in a much larger conversation about educating our students for vocation and for exploring your own vocational purpose. Once you’ve decided on an approach, work with your Campus Contact who can fill out the form available on NetVUE’s website and apply to participate in the program. Once approved, you will receive your free books.

We hope you’ll consider engaging the Big Read this year on your campus and look forward to hearing about its impact on your community—especially as it fosters engagement, interest, and commitment to seeking and teaching about “hope in a time of crisis.” According to another participant in last year’s Big Read, this opportunity gave their campus “a mechanism to break down silos across departments and schools. . . . It was a great way to discuss our own callings and journeys in order to get to know one another better, and also to talk about the ways we interact with our students over questions on callings.” 

We would love to see you at one of our many regional gatherings this year as a place to continue connecting in this nuanced and important conversation about vocation. These opportunities provide a way for those of us who work in higher education to find renewed purpose in our daily work and enrich connections with students and each other.

Erin VanLaningham is NetVUE’s director of project development. In this role, she directs the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project, co-hosts the NetVUE podcast, Callings: Conversations on College, Career, and a Life Well Lived, and serves as book and resource review editor for the NetVUE journal, Studies in Vocation and Calling. At her home institution—Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa—she serves as professor of English and special advisor to the president. She is the editor and contributor to Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good (Oxford, 2024) and co-editor of Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies (Edinburgh, 2022). In 2017, Erin participated in the inaugural NetVUE faculty seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration.  

Teaching Shakespeare as Vocational Formation

The writer reflects on her complex relationship with teaching Shakespeare, acknowledging a history of not fully understanding his work. However, through teaching, she’s realized Shakespeare’s plays prompt essential vocational reflections and discussions about life’s ambiguities. These challenges evoke meaningful insights for students, shaping their perspectives on personal struggles and societal issues.

The Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare (circa 1610), public domain.

The first post in a series on Shakespeare, pedagogy, and the power of literature to help us navigate ambiguity.

I am a teacher of Shakespeare with a fraught relationship with the Bard. Every time I walk into my upper-level Shakespeare seminar, I hear notes of vocational dissonance, and my imposter syndrome surges.

This tension may have begun when I received a lower-than-expected grade on my Hamlet paper in the ninth grade. Or maybe because most of the performances of his work that I saw before adulthood (and after, if I’m honest) left me feeling like I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Even as I completed my dissertation on 16th-century British literature, my advisor had to nudge me: “You know, you should really let Shakespeare make an appearance.” I did, but reluctantly.

My resistance to Shakespeare wasn’t a response to his canonicity or to problematic depictions of sex, gender, or race—though these issues can be good reasons to evaluate when and how we teach his plays. Perhaps like others who feel pressured by our culture to like Shakespeare but don’t particularly enjoy or understand his work, I resisted him because his plays resisted my interpretive grasp.

My attitude shifted only after I started teaching his plays. I discovered that these interpretive gaps are often what make his work compelling to students, and they give Shakespeare vocational vitality, even today.

As Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies reminds us, literature of all kinds can nurture vocational exploration and discernment. For David Cunningham, fiction, poetry, and plays have the vocational power to shape faith and to shepherd us through suffering. Literature is full of stories and characters that evoke meaningful conversations on what it means to live a good and purposeful life.

But even beyond what literature says and depicts, the interpretive process itself can also evoke vocational reflection. Moments of difficulty—ambiguities, contradictions, lack of resolutions—become opportunities to wrestle with and return to, postures that can be vocationally formative. After all, our vocations are often circuitous and marked by doubt and uncertainty, as David Youland and Younus Mirza attest.

By vocation, I mean an expansive sense of calling—all the places, people, purposes, and processes that invite our presence, labor, and energy. Some of these are chosen callings; others may have been inadvertently acquired; and still others we may prefer to discard. To adapt a line about greatness from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Some are born to vocations; some achieve vocations; and some have vocations thrust upon them.”

Together, these callings shape our time, work, and leisure, and we spend much of our lives trying to negotiate their competing claims on us. Often these vocations leave us seeking the ever-elusive “balance” as we find ourselves stuck in the messy middle, not entirely sure how we got here or what step to take next. This reality is no less true of our professional lives than it is of our faith, friendships, marriages, parenting, or civic responsibilities—all those spheres where ambiguity and irresolution thrive. As Paul Burmeister reminds us, our vocations are dynamic and ambiguous, requiring a “fluidity of discernment.”

And so it is that I beckon my students to literature where they witness and wrestle with this murkiness, stretching interpretive muscles they’ll exercise across their vocational lives. And Shakespeare, I’ve found, is especially fruitful for this formation, a topic which Jason Stevens has also explored.

man holding and looking at a human skull
Photo by Никита Кригер on Pexels.com

Shakespeare’s plays are full of complicated depictions of agency, power, abuse, scandal, and sacrifice, themes that play out in the realms of sex, religion, politics, injustice, and tragedy. In watching characters discuss and embody different ways of understanding these ideas, students are compelled not by tidy endings and resolved tensions—we find little of such moments in Shakespeare’s canon, after all—but to the messy display of human dynamics that resist easy solutions and obvious answers.

Last spring, as my students reflected on what their study of Shakespeare had taught them, it wasn’t his poetic prowess or the riveting train wreck of Tudor-era politics that compelled them most. Instead, it was his surprising way of illuminating what they find most puzzling and problematic about their own present realities.

For one student, King Lear became a lens for processing the grief of losing grandparents to dementia. Another student reported thinking back to The Merchant of Venice when he pondered his instinct to avoid certain city streets or to ignore the man begging for money at the intersection near campus. The comedy Much Ado About Nothing catalyzed, for one student, a scathing critique of BookTok and, for another, helped her reimagine the perennial pressures women feel between marriage and independence. In each case, it was Shakespeare’s invitation to wrestle and re-see that drew them in.

Literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare’s “preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well-made, and settled” is a defining trait of his work. “The opacity,” Greenblatt writes, “was shaped by his experience of the world and his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations.” Shakespeare, it turns out, was quite a normal chap.

Shakespeare, it turns out, was quite a normal chap.

He knew the economic and relational pressures of marriage. Church records indicate he married Anne Hathaway (eight years his senior) when he was only 18, just three months before she gave birth to their first daughter. He spent most of his life building a career in London while his wife and children stayed behind in Stratford. He was deeply acquainted with grief, losing his son Hamnet at 11 years old. With high infant mortality rates and average life expectancy between 30 and 40 years, he was surely familiar with suffering and felt the pervasive pulse of fear. His sonnets and soliloquys reflect the psychological turmoil of unrequited love, the fear of being found out, disillusionment with church and state, the fragility of the human body, and the urgency of time’s unyielding march. While we don’t know the specific experiences that prompted these meditations, they attest to a life well acquainted with the tandem roads of joy and sorrow, hope and pain, faith and doubt.

It’s this familiarity that has, over time, eased some of my frustration with teaching his work. If the plays resist my interpretive grasp, they also mirror what it’s like to navigate an often unclear and always tenuous life. In the classroom, these moments of dissonance and disruption illustrate the continued vitality of teaching Shakespeare. In the next three posts, I’ll explore how moments of contradiction, disruption, and irresolution in Shakespeare’s plays have fueled opportunities for vocational reflection and clarity. Beyond what literature says, it’s the very practice of reading it—especially when it’s difficult—that we experience its power to change us and shape our callings.

Julianne Sandberg is an associate professor of English at Samford University, where she teaches first-year writing courses and British literature. Her teaching and scholarship often explore the intersection between theology and literature, and she is the author of Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed Eucharist. A participant in the 2025 NetVUE Writing Colloquy, she writes about life, literature, and faith on her blog, A Companioned Life.

You Are Not Enough: Limitations Are Essential for a Healthy Vocation

This post discusses the importance of recognizing and embracing personal limitations in professional and academic life. It emphasizes that acknowledging these limits can lead to healthier work-life balance, reduced burnout, and greater vocational fulfillment. The authors advocate for strategic decision-making regarding commitments to enhance well-being and productivity.

A co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

If we’re being honest, most of us hesitate to admit to our limitations. Instead, we overpromise, overcommit, and sometimes even burn out. We often attempt to skirt our limitations, power through them, or ignore them and hope they won’t trip us again. Yet doing so can lead to a downward spiral of feeling inadequate, hoping that accomplishing something might raise our spirits, but then we reach our limits and feel inadequate once more.

scrabble letter tiles spelling limits
Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

What if, instead of dodging our limitations or carefully hiding them from others, we accepted them openly and graciously—and considered them as central to a healthy vocation?

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Weaving Art into Vocational Discernment and Research

From April 22 to May 17, 2026, the “Alive: Journeys in the Making” exhibition at the Putnam Museum showcased a collaborative project between Çağlar Çetin-Ayşe and Augustana students, exploring vocational journeys. It emphasized interdependence, creativity, and community through artistic expression, encouraging a shift from individual narratives to collective experiences in vocational discernment.

From April 22 to May 17, 2026, the Putnam Museum and Science Center at Augustana College hosted an exhibition that I—along with three Augustana students—created in response to this question: “How could art offer us a dynamic space that enables a deeper reflection, both individually and collectively, on vocation and our journeys?” The exhibition was titled Alive: Journeys in the Making, and it marked the culmination of a research project I conducted with these student as co-researchers. This project was supported by a NetVUE Grant to Individuals for Vocational Exploration and grew out my participation in Augustana College’s ALIVE (Augustana Leaders in Vocational Exploration) program, which invites sophomore students into a collective vocational discernment process. The program has recently completed its fifth year, and I have had the pleasure of serving as one of the mentors for the past two years. As researchers, we set out to examine the program’s transformative impact on us and to invite a broader audience into the dialogue surrounding vocation.

A gallery view from the exhibition at the Putnam Museum. Photograph by Çağlar Çetin-Ayşe.
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Recognizing and Valuing the Identities of Student-Athletes

This post discusses the deep connection between student-athletes’ identities and their athletic experiences, as they often dedicate significant time to mastering their sport. This focus can limit their exploration of other interests and vocational opportunities. Educators are encouraged to understand this context and foster holistic support for student-athletes’ academic and personal growth.

A series on vocation and student-athletes.

young athlete training outdoors in arizona
Photo by Jessie Kiermayr on Pexels.com

According to Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours of intentional work at a particular skill to achieve mastery. For student-athletes, especially those who have practiced their sport since childhood, they often reach this status by the time they reach middle school. For educators who work with collegiate student-athletes, we must recognize that they have spent most of their time and energy building mastery in their sport, and they view the work ethic, dedication, and diligence needed in this context very differently from how they master skills in academic settings.

For example, in a straw poll in one of my classes, students indicated that some of them started playing sports as early as the age of three. When these students reach college, they have experienced most major emotional, intellectual, and physical milestones as an athlete. Their athletic identity developed right alongside their identity as an individual: being a student-athlete is deeply rooted in who they are, not just something they do. If we do not understand the context and depth of this identification and its importance, then it can be challenging for faculty and staff members to work with our student-athletes.

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Why Vocation is Never Solitary

This explores the relationship between self-awareness, vocational exploration, and community feedback. It emphasizes the importance of balancing individual and collective identities, suggesting that insights from trusted others can reveal strengths and blind spots. The Johari window tool is recommended for deeper self-understanding and growth in vocational contexts.

A series drawing on a therapist’s insights into play, wandering, and presence in relation to vocational exploration and discernment.

In the first post of my series, I offered a method of reviewing your childhood self at play as a way to provide insight into your being-role, an aspect of yourself that is necessary to cultivate to flourish vocationally. This approach could suggest incorrectly that vocational exploration is primarily inward focused and solitary. But vocational understanding requires more than introspection. From our earliest moments, self-understanding emerges in relationships with others whom we trust and who can clarify strengths or needs that develop latent attributes within us. Exploring vocation requires both inward and “other-ward” attention.

collage photo of woman
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

In this post, I offer a reminder that we are never simply an “I” unto ourselves. U.S. culture—especially in academic contexts—heavily skews toward individualistic notions of the self, yet there is always a “we” in any “me.” Many of our collective networks speak powerfully to our identities and the manifest forms of our vocations if given the opportunity. Social psychology posits that in any one individual there are many varied selves dependent on the social environment. The self that you reveal to your family at home around the dinner table is notably different from the one you present at a professional conference. Both are authentically you, but specific aspects of the self are more dominant in each environment. Often different aspects of ourselves may be more visible in a particular social context and therefore may be witnessed more directly by those in our life and somewhat obscure from our own recognition.

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What’s Next? The Dignity of Work in a Culture of Climbing

The author reflects on the impact of the “What’s next?” mentality, which can lead to stress and dissatisfaction among students focused on future achievements. He contrasts this attitude with the need to feel contentment in our present work and lives. Promoting a sense of dignity in labor may help cultivate healthier aspirations and appreciation for the present.

A series on vocation, the dignity of labor, and the misconceptions that prevent us from valuing all work.

My favorite show of all time is The West Wing, and the evidence of that love is everywhere. Questions from the series adorn my computer at work. I have Toby’s rubber brainstorming ball in my office. I devoured podcasts about the show years after it went off the air. I’ve bought my wife West Wing gifts, as she has for me. And it’s possible that two of my kids were named after characters from the show (okay, that was a coincidence). The most famous line from the show is probably the oft-repeated phrase, “What’s next?” These words are President Bartlet’s motto as he navigates his days in the Oval Office—his way of saying that the present task is done, and it is time to turn our attention to other matters. I love its crisp, clear, directional tone and the way he uses this phrase to lead his team through their shared work together. As I’ve watched the series over and over, these words have wormed their way into my lexicon as well. I’m guessing my fellow West Wing fans can relate!

There is another way of asking that question, though, that is less helpful, particularly for those of us who work in the field of vocation. I remember when my son—who is about to start college this fall—was in the eighth grade and visited a local high school. The guidance counselor, not surprisingly, asked him what kind of college he hoped to get into one day. He rattled off an answer and the counselor responded that if he wanted to get into that college, he would have to test out of freshman level math that day, as an eighth grader. It was disheartening to see the way a middle-school student tied his college hopes to the outcome of an exam he had to take at age 14. This exam created an overwhelming amount of undue stress. In his mind, it carried the fortunes not of his next step of high school, but his next-next step.

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Sustaining Our Vocations with Purpose and Joy

This post introduces a co-authored series addressing the vocational challenges faculty members face in higher education. The authors share their personal experiences as they reflect on their own vocational shifts at work. They emphasize the need for a sustainable approach to vocation, highlighting key themes like recognizing limits, the importance of community, and cultivating joy in their work to support faculty thriving.

The first post in a co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

female teacher looking stressed
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After receiving the news that I, Elisabeth, had been awarded tenure and promoted in the spring of 2023 at age 39, I felt elated—and then, immediately burned out. Certainly, the summer before, when I submitted my application, had been arduous. My family sold and bought a house, we moved, my husband started a new job, my kids started at new schools, and we all got COVID. Then the school year seemed to fill every possible nook and cranny of time. As news of this milestone spread, colleagues asked, “How do you feel?” I answered, “I need to figure out how to do this job sustainably and with joy. Or I need to do something else.”

I, Kristin, accepted my first job as an assistant professor in 2021 when I was 37 years old, following five years of graduate school and ten years as a high school teacher. I enjoyed teaching but was ready to pursue research and writing more intentionally. By the time I turned 40, I had developed seven different courses across four programs and was serving on several committees, mostly unrelated to my research. I realized I needed to pivot and try again, or I would never reach my research goals before going up for tenure.

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AI and the Defiant Hope of Vocation

Recent seasons of prominent TV shows feature generative AI, reflecting its influence on various parts of society, including higher education. Addressing AI’s role in vocation work is essential, as it impacts human purpose and agency. Through NetVUE, discussions can explore AI’s transformative potential while encouraging a nuanced understanding of its implications limitations. Ultimately, NetVUE provides a much needed space to figure out how best to respond to this existential threat.

Storylines about generative artificial intelligence played key roles in the most recent seasons of several award-winning television shows, as viewers of The Comeback, Hacks, and The Pitt can attest to. These storylines are not surprising: AI is reshaping everything in our world from art and commerce to education and health care, and more pointedly, labor protections related to AI were a key feature of the 2023 writers’ strike in Hollywood. AI has also impacted higher education, itself full of events, institutes, seminars, conferences, and statements, with resources for faculty, staff, administrators, and campuses to engage in conversations about AI.

close up shot of a typewriter
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Given how AI has come to fill every nook and cranny of our culture—and likely your campus and professional life as well—what unique contributions does NetVUE bring to this conversation?

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Building a Vocational Praxis of Teamwork

This post explores how community-engaged learning (CEL) fosters vocational exploration through teamwork. It highlights the transformative potential of collaborative experiences, enabling students to enhance communication skills and discover their personal and communal responsibilities. Real-life examples illustrate how teamwork can significantly impact personal growth and understanding of vocation as a shared journey.

A series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

silver and black pens on a black surface
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As previous posts in this series have illustrated, community-engaged learning (CEL) is a powerful pedagogy for facilitating vocational exploration. This post builds on those insights to show how opportunities for teamwork in CEL projects can further deepen vocational work. Most faculty members recognize that teamwork enables students to construct knowledge together, simulating the kind of collaboration, problem-solving, and communication that is ubiquitous in professional environments. Indeed, teamwork promotes the vital skills that the National Association of Colleges and Employers heralds, which include the following:

  • Careful listening,
  • Understanding and asking appropriate questions,
  • Managing conflict and making compromises,
  • Interacting with and respecting diverse viewpoints and personalities
  • Meeting ambiguity with resilience and agility,
  • Meeting one’s responsibilities, and
  • Developing strong, positive working relationships.

But teamwork also empowers students to discover their gifts and talents, to consider their life purpose, and to examine how their life journeys are, as Erin VanLaningham writes, not “singular paths,” but rather roads intersecting with and affected by others. Teamwork shows how our lives are “called forth by others,” in Jason Mahn’s framing, because it enables us to build new relationships in purposeful communities. This post provides an example of an intentionally designed teamwork experience in a CEL seminar to show how this high-impact practice of collaboration can be marshaled for vocational discovery.

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