The Attention Gym III: From Classmates to Workout Partners

This post presents the classroom as an “attention gym,” where learning requires effort, practice, and mutual encouragement. It argues that vocation and education should be understood communally rather than individually. By using interactive classroom activities, including learning each other’s names, rotating one-on-one conversations, personalized peer feedback, changing groups, and attentive discussion, teachers can foster friendships, collaboration, and students’ ability to support one another.

A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.

Last spring, two of my students told me about a conversation they had with a friend who was in a different section of first-year writing. Their friend was aghast at the amount of time they were spending on reading and writing in my class and felt that he was able to get by in a different section of the same course by putting in less effort. One of my students told him, “Dude, that’s like going to the gym and sitting on the floor and just looking at the weights.” His classmate chimed in, “Yeah, we’d never let each other phone it in like that.”

men sitting at the park while having conversation
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I love this story because it means that my metaphor for class as an attention gym had stuck with these two young men: they saw our class as a kind of workout, one that stretched and challenged them to get stronger.

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Vocation and Pedagogy V: Broadening Students’ Visions for Their Futures

A science capstone course became more engaging when students connected data-analysis skills to community policy proposals and vocational reflection. The project helped students recognize their scientific education’s value beyond scientific careers, encouraging civic contribution and broader vocational imagination. More broadly, vocation-informed, research-based teaching fosters belonging, motivation, skill development, and meaningful connections between classroom learning and life.

A series exploring the connections between vocation and pedagogy.

A capstone course can be a deeply tender experience for graduating students, reflecting their vulnerability as they complete their degrees. Life after college, with its many promises and possibilities, is rapidly approaching. These possibilities might feel more limited than some students anticipated as they experience blocked, conflicted, fractured, and unexpected callings (to use the framework that Bonnie Miller-McLemore describes in Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling). When a student enters a capstone course—which often requires significant reflection on a student’s college experience—it can sometimes aggravate blisters caused by their current efforts to discern and live out their vocations.

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The Problem Perfectionism Poses for Vocational Discernment

The pressure to achieve perfection, exacerbated by societal expectations and social media, can lead to anxiety and limit opportunities for undergraduate students. This fear of failure can also interfere with meaningful vocational exploration, since failure can play a meaningful role in discerning a sense of calling and purpose in life. Acknowledging failure and imperfection fosters resilience and learning and can help young people navigate their lives more meaningfully.

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“Perfection is the enemy.”

This simple phrase became a mantra of sorts for our cohort in graduate school. The group included students who wanted to stand out in the best way, especially during the first year. We’d compare notes and check each other’s progress in a quest for the perfect submission. After several semesters, we recognized (at last) that the perfect submission was elusive. Never-ending revisions gave way to doing our best possible (but not necessarily perfect) work, making necessary refinements, and meeting deadlines.

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New Issue of Studies in Vocation and Calling Explores Communal Frameworks for Vocation

This post celebrates the release of the most recent issue of Studies in Vocation and Calling. It opens by discussing the complexities of helping students, particularly first-generation college attendees, navigate their vocational paths amid personal interests, economic pressures, and family expectations. This example illustrates the need for educators to support communal frameworks of calling, reflecting on how societal forces impact students’ perceptions of vocation. These issues are foregrounded and explored by the various contributions in this issue as they develop more communal frameworks for vocational exploration.

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Several years ago, an advisee came into my office at the end of her first year of college. She had spent the first year reveling in her art and literature courses and was finally ready to declare her major. In what? In nursing, of course! We spent quite a bit of time working through the unavoidable reality that she would need to take a lot of science courses to pursue nursing—courses, mind you, she said she had absolutely no interest in. But nursing pays well (she needed to break a generational socio-economic cycle), and it involves caring for people (which she was good at and was important to her), and—perhaps above all—it was her mother’s clear expectation that she would become a nurse.

I have no doubt many readers—both at NetVUE member institutions and beyond—have experienced similar moments with their advisees. Conversations like these embody, in real time, the daily work of vocation, which is as complex and complicated as each individual student’s life. Yet the themes reflect the nearly universal needs of many of our students, especially those who are first-generation: in this student’s story we witness the uneasy intersection of interests and talents, personal commitments, economic realities, cultural narratives about worthy work, and family expectations. Helping students untangle and reweave these strands in ways that nurture their formation—and their hope for their own future—is a challenge faced collectively by those committed to educating for vocation. These advising conversations might take place in private with individual students, but the work of weaving together the larger tapestry of vocation on our campuses is a much more public endeavor, one that requires team effort.

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Vocational Formation in the First Year: Realizing the Promise, Avoiding the Pitfalls

This post discusses the significance and challenges of vocational formation in the first-year college experience. While it recognizes the potential for students to start exploring and discerning their vocations, it also highlights the overwhelming uncertainties they face and the challenges in doing so. The authors propose three strategic priorities to enhance vocational programming, emphasizing foundational work and reflection.

The first post in a collaborative series on vocation in the first-year experience.

Looking back on our own first-year experiences as undergraduate students, all three of us recognize how easily our memories have been shaped by what came afterward. As Cynthia reflects on her first year (admittedly through rose-colored glasses), she recalls the lifelong friendships she formed, her growth as a writer, finding a home in a faith community, and—viewed now through the lens of a career in higher education—the first seeds of her vocation. What is easier to forget are the uncertainties that accompanied those experiences: wondering if friendships would come and questioning whether admission to a “stretch” school reflected genuine ability or simply legacy status. She also lacked a clear sense of academic direction, even spending a season as a political science major, a choice that now seems baffling in terms of vocational fit.

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Those of us who engage students in vocation can be guilty of wearing similarly colored glasses. As James Lang wryly notes in “The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment,” the faculty members most eager to build transformative first-year programming are often the very ones for whom early college was transformative, mistaking their own exceptional case for the norm. The first year often feels promising for robust vocational programming—a fresh start, an eager audience, and tangible touchpoints for engagement. Yet we sometimes overlook that first-year students are overwhelmed with big and difficult questions: whether they will make friends, whether they have what it takes to succeed, and whether they have chosen the right area of study. And we discount that these concerns are formidable distractions from the deep work required for vocational discernment.

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Mentoring as Vocational Practice: Reflections on the NetVUE Regional Gathering at Presbyterian College

The NetVUE Regional Gathering at Presbyterian College emphasized the importance of mentorship in the context of experiential learning as a way to support students’ vocational exploration. Keynote speakers, Andy Chan and Terese Lund, encouraged participants to accompany students in discovering their purpose, asking good questions and providing space to sit with the uncertainty as part of their growth process. The gathering explored strategies for creating a supportive mentoring culture.

According to Terese Lund, “mentoring is the relational infrastructure for formation,” a definition she offered on the second day of the NetVUE Regional Gathering at Presbyterian College that took place September 24–26 in Clinton, South Carolina. The assistant vice president of Purposeful Pathways and professor of psychology at Wingate University, Lund drew on her experience as an administrator, faculty member, and mentor as she mapped out a few significant vocational frameworks for participants to consider. She then invited them to reflect on them as they explored the role of mentoring in experiential learning as a key part of vocational exploration and discernment for undergraduate students. As Lund argued, this process is one that students “should not have to do alone.”

The theme of this gathering was Vocational and Experiential Learning: The Call to Mentorship, which focused on this central question: “How does mentorship in experiential learning opportunities foster genuine vocational formation in students?”  Over the course of three days, participants examined the role that such opportunities play in student learning, sharing concrete practices that could deepen the mentoring culture on their own campuses—all with an emphasis on this work could shape students’ sense of purpose and calling.

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Teaching King Lear: Choosing the Path of Most Resistance

This post on Vocation Matters takes up the question of how to help students navigate their multiple callings in multiple communities. They often don’t have experience working through this tension, which motivates the author to teach King Lear. When reading this play, students confront the tragic end of Cordelia, a character who is punished for her virtues rather than rewarded for them. Her death illustrates how living vocationally can often bring sacrifice and suffering. Teaching this Shakespearean play can help students grapple with narratives that disrupt their expectations and mature vocationally.

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

It’s a regular occurrence, especially among students who are overcommitted and socially invested. They request an extension for what they assure me is a really good reason.

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One student can’t finish her paper on time because her roommate is in the hospital, and she had to spend all night there, keeping watch over her friend.

Another asks for a make-up quiz because his girlfriend was, in his words, “having a rough time” and “needed to talk.”

I once had a student provide documentation that the geriatric dog she was pet-sitting had died and she had to handle the logistics.

If we assume (perhaps sometimes too generously) that these stories are true, then the students are right: They do have a very good reason. And they are fairly confident that if they just explain the context clearly enough, then I—their kind, nurturing, female professor—will show mercy. Because if they “had to” or “needed to” do something else truly meaningful, then the academic impact should surely be mitigated.

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Practicing Purpose and Joy: Vocational Discernment for Faculty Members

This post concludes a series on faculty thriving and highlights the importance of cultivating purpose and joy for faculty members in higher ed. Drawn from insights from the volume the authors edited, it suggests that flourishing requires a rethinking of purpose and joy as practices, not destination, as well as a supportive institutional culture to cultivate well-being and fulfillment.

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

Last spring, we came across this image on Instagram (great oracle of wisdom that it is), posted by the Open Discovery Institute (ODIN), that summarized the “benefits of staying in academia after PhD.” Without putting too fine a point on it, the things that many of us might hope for (a fair salary, holistic wellbeing, good mental health, and vocational confidence in the future) were not included on the pie chart. In fact, as a close look at the chart suggests, it’s unclear what the actual benefits of remaining in higher education are. Compared to ODIN’s usual posts, which receive hundreds and sometimes a few thousand likes, this post received over 26,000. Clearly, it struck a chord.

As we conclude our series on pursuing purpose and joy as faculty members, we want to offer encouragement to our faculty colleagues in higher education, pushing back on the gallows humor that many academics, including ourselves, indulge in when we talk about our vocations. Our previous posts focused on faculty burnout, why our limitations are important, and how friendships help sustain us. Our final post reflects on cultivating purpose and joy.

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Good Enough Faithfulness

This post highlights the pressure to achieve in higher education and offers an alternative to this mindset. It emphasizes the importance of embracing life’s messiness and acknowledging conflicting callings. Instead of striving for perfection, it suggests fostering gratitude and recognizing “good enough” actions to cultivate a meaningful vocation in different life seasons.

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

Humble callings upon an early rise, easy to cast aside.
The glory in a student’s struggle—how to uniquely guide?
A thoughtful intellectual, with time and curiosity to give,
An ideal image that often collides with how most of us actually live.
The simple truth is our lives are full, with care and needs each day.
How easy to critique, dismiss, and belittle the impact of our way.
The calling is not perfection and meeting every need,
The calling is rhythm, reflection, and goodness of the deed.

—Carrie Caudill

Achievement and optimization mindsets have become deeply ingrained in the culture of higher education. My own internal script often demands, “Go, go, go! Grade those papers. Make this class content more interactive. Don’t forget about applying for that grant proposal. Oh, and look on Amazon—your son needs a new lunch box. Don’t forget to respond to the Meal Train request, and the committee meeting is in 15 minutes, so you can do something in the 13 minutes before you log on to Teams. Go!”

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What’s Your Purpose, When You Can’t Get out of Bed?

Lucille Clifton (Wikimedia Commons)

In her poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton writes,

come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

I first read these words when I was in college in the spring of 2012. Trayvon Martin had been killed, and I was sitting in a theology course on Genesis and Exodus, grappling with the fact that being a Black woman often meant not feeling safe in this world, in classrooms, and even in our bodies. At the time, the words made me deeply sad and, as my big cousin used to say when I was growing up, they “made my nerves bad.”

I didn’t truly embody these words or know their real impact until 2020. While everyone in the world was weathering the pandemic—during which over 300,000 people died in the United States alone—I was simultaneously struggling with challenges in my own body and navigating higher education as I held space for students whose stories were like mine. At that time, it felt almost impossible to support Black students exhausted from racial battle fatigue at a predominantly white institution. So much uncertainty and doubt played in my mind.

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