Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework
“I was amazed that something so personal like exploring my ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ in a group could feel so right.”
NWU communication studies student
Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor. Our department’s guiding principle is inspired by W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen’s “Coordinated Management of Meaning,” which posits that we create meaning and manage our social reality in community. “What are we creating together?” is emblazoned on our brochures and syllabi and even stenciled on our walls as a reminder that we co-construct our environment—we have agency over and responsibility for our co-created relationships. Our students resonate so deeply with this principle that a recent graduate decorated her mortar board with it.
Vocation exploration certainly requires solitude and personal reflection. Yet we have witnessed the added benefit of authentic dialogue in the pursuit of unraveling the big questions of “Who am I?” “What is my calling?” and “How can I contribute?” Using dialogic principles to complement a traditional rhetorical model of communication, students in our department explore theoretical, practical, and now vocational applications of communication in interpersonal, intercultural, organizational, and civic settings. For nearly 20 years, we have prioritized dialogue in most of our courses and have seen the benefits of guiding students in meaningful discourse to think through complicated issues and come to fresh realizations. Because we scaffold dialogue within individual courses and across a student’s undergraduate experience, we have cultivated a shift from superficial engagement to deep reflective engagement.
Vocation exploration is a perfect curricular fit within our major and minor because many of our required classes, including our Introduction and Intercultural Communication courses, are also service courses that draw students from all parts of campus. To add to this diversity, communication studies students are called to a wide array of post-graduation professions. Such an interdisciplinary mix provides a unique opportunity for students to gather a rich variety of perspectives around vocational discernment.
Since you are reading this post, you know that Vocation Matters is a treasure chest of resources. Its content provides the opportunity for our faculty members to locate inspirational writing for dialogue prompts, and some posts are ideal readings for students prior to their small group dialogues. For instance, gems such as “The Power of Chats,” “Attending to Voices,” “Building Multicultural Competency,” and “Identity Exploration and Vocational Discernment” contain themes of courageously building personal relationships as a way to understand identity. Additionally, we use Hannah Schell’s “Giving and Receiving Advice” as a guide for structuring dialogues around the Callings end-of-season podcast episodes (Season 1 Highlights, Season 2 Highlights, Season 3 Highlights) and then ask students in our introductory courses to listen to and discuss them.
More broadly, we share the science and art of authentic engagement using researched dialogic and invitational communication principles before commencing dialogue in any course. For a primer, you might turn to Matthew Sayers’s “Twelve Ground Rules on Dialogue for Difference” as it briefly mirrors what we have done in our department for years. For more detailed works, consider reading Marianne Mille Bojer, Heiko Roehl, Marianne Knuth, and Colleen Magner’s Mapping Dialogue: Essential Tools for Social Change (2008), Oliver Escobar’s Public Dialogue and Deliberation: A Communication Perspective for Public Engagement Practitioners (2011), or David Bohm’s “On Dialogue” (1998). These are but a few of the many helpful sources we reference to create a culture of dialogue in our department and now across our campus.
In our courses, students learn and develop the skills that comprise effective dialogue from the first day of class; we devote daily class time to active listening, using invitational verbal and nonverbal communication, and cultivating present moment awareness via contemplative practices such as intentional breath work or simply sitting in silence for a minute. When taking part in any dialogue, including those around vocation, students are asked to prepare, engage, and reflect. Preparation might include reading, watching, or listening to content (as mentioned above). Then, students engage with the content and each other. We hope that this engagement results in new understanding, new knowledge, and even new questions. Once the dialogue has concluded, students write brief reflections addressing prompts that encourage them to consider their role in the dialogue and what they learned. Here are a few examples from last semester’s student reflections after the vocation dialogues:
- “I thought I was the only one nervous about what’s next or making the wrong choice, but I now know I’m not.”
- “Really listening and asking questions can help another person understand themselves—I’m happy I learned that.”
- “As we’ve been learning in class, I can be safely comfortable with being uncomfortable. That goes for opening up in a group and not really knowing every step of what’s next.”
We have been delighted that the vocational seeds sowed last semester have resulted in spontaneous mentions of vocation this semester. For example, I teach an applied research methods course in which each student is placed with a different nonprofit organization as they conduct a semester-long case study. Recently, students have, unprompted, employed vocation vocabulary such as “purposeful work,” “calling,” and “collective well-being” as they describe their fieldwork. My colleagues have also remarked that students in their Organizational Communication and Communication in Contemporary Society classes have connected course material to their personal vocations and the notion that we should be having conversations about vocation. And only yesterday, after four civic and nonprofit leaders joined us on campus to discuss civic engagement, a student approached me in a joking lament, “Since last semester in your class, all I can think of is leading a life of purpose and passion. It was like the panelists were having a vocation dialogue right on that stage.”
It’s clear that dialogue around the topic of vocation has been transformative. Our greatest hope is that students’ understanding and appreciation of vocational reflection continues to grow as they engage with one another. I will close with a segment of a final class reflection from last semester that captures why vocational dialogues will remain a staple in our learning communities:
After all our vocation dialogues this semester, I feel a weight has been lifted. I understand so much more about myself. I was only thinking about what other people wanted me to do and I was only thinking about the future. After what we read and after all our talks, I realize I can use my passion to lead me. I’m passionate about my friends, I’m passionate about my classes (well, at least most of them), and I’m passionate about sports. And those things are my vocation now. I’m relaxed enough to be curious and to be OK not having everything figured out. Everything about my job and happiness and what I’m “supposed” to be, has become clearer since our discussions—especially the day we went outside. I don’t have to figure this out on my own. I’m grateful I now know how to think about vocation—but not just that—how to talk about it with friends.
Karla Jensen is a professor of communication studies and contemplative pedagogy at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. She has included vocation elements in her advising and teaching since NWU’s 2010 NetVUE visit.