Month: April 2023

Slow School: The Gift of Liberal Education

Could the “slow food” movement find its partner in holistic, liberal arts education—what we might properly call “slow school”?

When I was a freshman in college, my first-year seminar professor was Dr. Ann Brady, a former-nun-turned-English-professor, who had flowing red hair and oversized eyeglasses, and who often lamented about the phlegm she would find in the English building’s drinking fountain. I came to know her as a joyful person, but she was no-nonsense in the classroom. Faced with 18-year-olds slouching in their chairs, asking questions about what would be on the midterm, Dr. Brady insisted that we read literature more slowly and with fewer concerns about what we were supposed to be getting out of it. “These books will take time,” she said. “You’ve got to be willing to waste time with them.”

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Queering our Advising of LGBTQIA+ Students

Queering our approach to advisement helps students cultivate critical dispositions and build not only resilience but also resistance to injustice, thus creating the conditions of transformative possibility for flourishing within our institutions and beyond.

In my last post, I suggested how we might better educate ourselves as advisors and support our queer students as they explore and prepare for the world of work after graduation. Many of these strategies focused on helping students navigate the homo- and transphobic contexts of work. In this post, I consider a different angle by highlighting queer theory’s disruptive potential for our students’ academic journeys and vocational discernment. Queering our approach to advisement helps students cultivate critical dispositions and build not only resilience but also resistance to injustice, thus creating the conditions of transformative possibility for flourishing within our institutions and beyond.

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The Anxiety of Choice

As we give students choices, we need to be present with them, too, in whatever times and ways we can.

One semester in college, I earned an A-minus in private organ lessons. That minus annoyed me: I practiced my required hours and did what I was told to do. But I’d hit a stage at which I wasn’t told what to do on a crucial point: namely, how to set the stops for a piece. I had to choose for myself: Viole or flute? Trumpet or krummhorn? I balked. Hence the minus.

Despite their predictable chafing for freedom—the freedom to make choices—students often get stuck at the same place I did. They don’t actually want to make choices; they want someone else to make choices for them. This creates an obvious problem for discerning, let alone responding to, a vocation. In this post I will suggest some common reasons that we reject freedom of choice as well as some theological and practical means for overcoming these obstacles to embrace that freedom, making vocation possible.

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Well-Being and Vocational Discernment for the Health Professions

Scholars have advocated for emotional intelligence training during medical school for more than a decade. Although effective training models for graduate students and health care professionals exist, we need something similar for undergraduates.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at the University of Dayton to develop courses, programs, and opportunities for undergraduate vocational discernment in the health professions, including a first-year course, “Discover Health and Medicine.”
https://www.vivekmurthy.com/about

In his August 2022 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general of the United States, discusses the mental and physical challenges that health professionals face. He cites several factors that contribute to these challenges and states that “we need to build a culture that supports well-being.” From his perspective, “culture change must start in our training institutions, where the seeds of well-being can be planted early.”

Interview with Dr. Vivek H. Murthy
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Kristin Kobes Du Mez on Holding Things Loosely

The hosts of NetVUE’s podcast Callings recently sat down for a conversation with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University.

The hosts of NetVUE’s podcast Callings recently sat down for a conversation with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since the publication of her New York Times bestselling book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020), she has been in the middle of intense public debates about faith, nationalism, and gender in American Evangelicalism. In this episode, Kristin shares some of the story behind that story, reflecting on the role that historical research plays in public life.

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Vocation in Action: Community Engagement with Diverse Populations

As part of its 2023 UnConference, NetVUE hosted a webinar on March 23 with three teams who discussed their experiences and strategies for actively integrating vocation into diverse populations so that both our students and our communities benefit.

As our society continues to become more diverse and connected to the global community, students need to consider their vocations in a sociocultural context. In addition to helping students discern their many callings in life, this work can make an important contribution to developing campuses and communities that are more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just. As part of its 2023 UnConference, NetVUE hosted a webinar on March 23 with three teams who discussed their experiences and strategies for actively integrating vocation into diverse populations so that both our students and our communities benefit.

From left to right: John DeCostanza, Sheila Bauer-Gatsos, Bradley Pardue, and Trishia Kholodenko.

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