Visualizations in Vocational Explorations

You, too, can incorporate visualizations—word clouds, concept maps, 2×2 matrices, diagrams, charts, and dashboards—into your teaching to enhance your students’ vocational exploration. I detail a few visual-based exercises below along with short instructions, examples, and possible variations to get the ideas flowing.

Do most of the vocation-focused assignments or activities that you do with students revolve around the written or spoken word? That’s exactly what I found when I was invited to team-teach the second iteration of a vocational exploration seminar for 70 first-year honors students. We had a great syllabus of readings, reflection papers, lectures, and small-group discussion questions, but, as a design professor, I was having difficulty delivering in one mode. Students were also struggling to stay engaged with little variety in our format.

I began looking for ways to include visual-based exercises. Each week, my colleague and I would look over the materials to determine one that we would shift into a visualization. We started small by adding visual components to worksheets: meters and scales for students to fill in as supplement to their written answers. To enhance small-group discussions, we invited groups to create collective Venn diagrams and affinity diagrams in response to questions.

Portion of a “To whom shall I listen?” worksheet featuring a volume bar for students to fill in to the appropriate level.
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Between the Shabby and the Sublime

My speculation is that we ought to acknowledge the low or shabby aspects without dismissing the high or sublime, and we ought to hold up the high or sublime aspects without disdaining the low or shabby. And the sublime that we seek or find is usually gifted to us as an outcome of a lot of work that can feel shabby.

For the title of this post, I’ve riffed on an idea of the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021.) I will use his splendid essay “The Shabby and the Sublime” from A Defense of Ardor to frame my thinking about aspects of vocation. Zagajewski meant “shabby” and “sublime” in tight correlation with “low” and “high” poetic styles. I will use “shabby” and “sublime” more loosely to refer to a range of applications to vocation.

Please read his original essay if you’re interested in his thoughts about an ontological requirement of poetry not to exclude high style. Zagajewski offered a pointed critique of modern poetry and of our time’s preference for low style over high style, for a simplistic style that excludes expressions of the sublime in favor of shabby chatter. His diagnosis when comparing a thing in poor condition from hard use or lack of care and a thing that is beautiful or good beyond measure may surprise you.

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Norman Wirzba on Agrarian Ways of Being

The fourth season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings is underway as hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton talk with Norman Wirzba, Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School and senior fellow at The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

The fourth season of NetVUE’s podcast Callings is underway as hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton talk with Norman Wirzba, Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School and senior fellow at The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Norman also serves as general editor for the book series Culture of the Land: A Series in the New Agrarianism (University Press of Kentucky) and is co-founder and executive committee member of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology. In this first episode of the new season of Callings, he shares his ideas about agrarian living, freedom and fidelity, and the importance of the ecological dimension of vocation.

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Toni Morrison and the Call to Imagine

Perhaps it is less clear, or less clearly stated, however, that robust career preparation requires the intentional and focused cultivation of the imagination—the ability to dream, speculate, and create the world not as it is but as it might and should be.

Throughout my time as a college educator, the purpose of higher education has become more and more tied to career preparation. This is not news to anyone. The shift to career preparation has been explained, re-explained, and debated by many of us for the last decade with few surprises along the way, save for the occasional fresh takes like Dan Barrett’s recovery of what he calls “The Day the Purpose of College Changed.”

In many ways, the attention and resources being given to career services align with best practices and offer holistic care for students as learners and as people. Colleges and universities must take career preparation seriously not only to recruit and retain students and thus survive this era of uncertainty but also to support students’ intellectual, social, mental, and economic wellness. Career preparation is, in my mind, a matter of justice in higher education today. It is also, however, too often narrowly designed and practiced.

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Introduction: Teaching Virtue and Vocation in History 

Often I’ve found that I carry aspects of the teacher’s call to my children, and—as I’ll explore in my upcoming series of posts—my parenting informs my pedagogy in return.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the history of teaching.

Martin Dotterweich

Vocations inform each other, and two of mine seem to be in constant dialogue, deep calling to deep: teaching and parenting. Often I’ve found that I carry aspects of the teacher’s call to my children, and—as I’ll explore in my upcoming series of posts—my parenting informs my pedagogy in return. I’m sure this is a common experience, but mine has a twist that keeps surprising me. This is because both of my children have autism.

It has been easy to see the ways that my teaching has affected my parenting, and Kathleen and Peter would probably attest with a roll of the eyes that, yes, Dad drags us to places he likes and talks a lot. There exists a video of me explaining a thatched roof to them in which they wander off while I keep talking. It’s on brand. 

More surprising has been how much my call as a parent has shaped my teaching and how much my children shape me as a person. I realize how much I learn from them. Specifically, they have helped me understand something that I teach in my history courses: the four cardinal virtues. 

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Follow Your Bliss? Bad Advice for Calling 

In a word, it took over messaging about life satisfaction and human fulfillment. Just figure out what you want. It’s that simple. Or so the nagging imperative promised. 

It’s time to dispel this myth. I can hardly think of worse advice to give anyone trying to discern what to do with their life.

Years ago, in a series of wildly popular interviews, historian Joseph Campbell uttered these words: “Follow your bliss.” But never in his wildest dreams did he imagine what would become of them.  

In the years since, this little piece of advice—dropped into a serious conversation with journalist Bill Moyers—has taken social media and advertising by storm. It shows up on t-shirts and self-help books, promising that all you must do to figure out your complicated life is to pursue what you’re passionate about. Although helpful for all of us who have repressed our own desires, the idea crept unbidden into discussions about calling. It permeated conversations with high school students and college freshmen as they struggled to determine next steps, majors and minors, academic degrees or jobs; and it colored the worlds of unhappy mid-lifers and senior citizens phasing into the unknowns of retirement. In a word, it took over messaging about life satisfaction and human fulfillment. Just figure out what you want. It’s that simple. Or so the nagging imperative promised. 

It’s time to dispel this myth. I can hardly think of worse advice to give anyone trying to discern what to do with their life. Instead, we need to tell the truth. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling, following a calling comes inevitably with undersides—struggles and complications that we can never fully anticipate and for which we need to be aware and prepared. Calling is, to borrow the words of researchers Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery Thompson, a “double-edged sword.” It “cuts both ways.” 

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Design Thinking for Vocation-Related Programming

If you want to help others catch the vision for, create a sustainable program about, or build community around vocational exploration, then seriously consider design thinking as a development framework.

Several years ago, I was tasked with co-leading a vocation initiative tied to the university’s reaccreditation. Although it was a high administrative priority, faculty and staff members saw the initiative as a top-down directive distracting from their day-to-day work. Yet my codirector and I needed to make it happen or there would be dire institutional consequences. We both believed deeply in the transformative power of vocational exploration, but our enthusiasm could only take the project so far. 

You might be in a similar position of leading a university-wide initiative with little faculty or staff buy-in. You may have been tasked with writing a NetVUE Vocation Across the Academy Grant proposal. Or maybe you want to start a grassroots movement to scale up vocational exploration beyond your classroom or small group of like-minded colleagues.

How do you create a vocational exploration program that will be meaningful and sustainable?

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Vocation and Film: Finding Meaning at the Movies

On September 26, 2023, NetVUE hosted a webinar focused on vocational elements in current films. Four speakers discussed their experiences using film and provided strategies for integrating movies in our work with students.

Engaging students in the classroom continues to be an essential yet challenging part of undergraduate education. Popular culture can provide an additional avenue for connection. Exploring meaning and purpose can be a creative and effective way to bring contemporary media into the classroom. On September 26, 2023, NetVUE hosted a webinar focused on vocational elements in current films. Four speakers discussed their experiences using film and provided strategies for integrating movies in our work with students.

Antonios Finitsis (upper left); Marie Drews (upper right);
Martin Dotterweich (lower left); Brian Bowman (lower right)
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Seeking the Irrelevant

By shifting from the individual to the whole, from the relevant to the irrelevant, from the “mine” to the “not mine”—by replacing the question “Who are you?” with the questions “Who are we?” and “Who can we be?”—we experienced a sense of community well beyond the walls of our classroom that relieved the isolation and the pressure for a few moments, which was profound.

I spent much of the past month reading essays by Marilynne Robinson with a small group of first-year undergraduate students. By way of the essays in When I Was a Child I Read Books, we talked about Moses, John Calvin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson; we explored questions of character, virtue, beauty, community, and the soul; and we worked hard—very, very hard at times—just to understand Robinson’s prose let alone to care about or enjoy her bold attachment for such long-dead and seemingly irrelevant things.

And yet, as Robinson says of her own early reading life, which was filled with books on Carthage, Constantinople, and the Cromwell revolution, “relevance was precisely not an issue” (85). Robinson describes reading as a way to roam meditatively and unassumingly through far-away stories, histories, experiences, and ideas, regardless of whether or not they were, in Robinson’s terms, “mine” or “not mine.” In fact, reading and meditating on the irrelevant became a way for Robinson to decenter herself, to dissolve herself, and to roam freely and joyfully away from herself and toward what might be called the “cosmic.”  

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Article of Note: The Good Life

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed shares research on how “good life courses” can prepare undergraduate students for more productive and meaningful lives.

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed shares research on how “good life courses” can prepare undergraduate students for more productive and meaningful lives.

Kristina Callina, Alicia Lynch, and Michael Murray conducted interviews with and collected survey data from professors and their students from 14 colleges and universities to determine if such courses work and how they work. They report their findings and explore the rising interest in such courses across the country in “Teaching the Good Life” (September 19, 2023). They identify “the essential pedagogical features of good life courses, how they impact students’ sense of purpose and well-being, and what educators can do to optimize successful implementation of good life courses at their postsecondary institutions.”

Not only do the findings show that these courses are valuable for students, but they also suggest that such courses can bring new energy to the humanities disciplines that often house and support them.

One of the institutions mentioned in the article, the University of Notre Dame, is home to a course called “God and the Good Life.” Among its teachers is UND philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan, who will deliver the keynote address at the 2024 NetVUE Conference.

Stephanie L. Johnson is the editor of Vocation Matters.

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