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
Vocation is a shared language for me and the students I teach, advise, and supervise. Not only are students still identifying their future careers but I, after 25 years as a professor in religious studies, am also still exploring my vocation by directing the Gender and Sexuality Studies program, which offers an interdisciplinary, advocacy major that draws on the humanities and the social sciences. This role illuminates for me that what we do as teachers, professors, advisors, and internship supervisors isn’t about sharing what we think we already know. In this program, the collaborative, high-impact practices do not include lecturing (see the AAC&U on high-impact practices). Instead, we engage students at the intersections of what we control and what we don’t, what we are good at and what we can do for others, and what can be planned for and what we encounter despite our planning—without perfectionism or self-deception. Both Gender and Sexuality Studies and vocational exploration invite students to rethink assumptions, to contribute to the world in which they want to live, and to be ready to redesign the shape that their engagement will take over a lifetime.
To strengthen the connection between college and public life, the departments that I serve in the undergraduate, liberal arts curriculum at Nebraska Wesleyan University (NWU) require projects in which imagination, listening, problem-solving, and meaningful compromise are practiced in public, civic engagement around issues that students care about and are cultivating expertise in. Starting with personal, self-contextualized reflections, the projects then scaffold co-curricular and course work explorations across first-year, sophomore, junior, and senior experiences in the following advisement and course assignment prompts:
- In first-year advisement, students actively explore their values and choices to construct meaningful paths and plans: How do you see your vocation as a student?
- In second- and third-year course assignments, students reflect on vocational exploration and discovery that values personal resiliency, empathy, and awareness of community: Using key scholars, interviews with professionals, and class discussions, how is this area of study enriching your sense of vocation?
- In third-year internship reflections, students consider how the meaning and purposes of the professional setting of their internship helps them to know who and how they want to be in the world: What is the meaning and purpose of this profession?
- In senior capstone projects, students practice responsible use of power in public letters and podcasts to communicate effectively the development of their sense of purpose in work and life that is not only informed by their disciplinary coursework, professional contexts, and internships but also accessible to non-college communities; thus, they are invited to rethink an assumption or question about their topic in which they cultivate curiosity, humility, uncertainty, openness, and hope: How did this area of study enrich your sense of vocation and open up possibilities for what is next?
The culminating, individual capstone experience in Gender and Sexuality Studies, once the epitome of individual, isolated accomplishment, was extended to provide experiential encounters for research embedded in community—campus, local, or publicly available online (for example, posting on SoundCloud). Faculty members redesigned the capstone requirement, which had formerly been an individual research paper, to be a public letter like those supported by The OpEd Project for the public communication of priorities, values, and problem-solving in community. Last year, so many members of campus and the local community, including representatives from Lincoln Literacy, attended the Gender and Sexuality Studies capstone presentations, we had to bring in extra chairs. Although newly instituted, our informal assessment shows a significant increase in students’ self-reported sense of belonging after their internships and public letters.
Why revisit vocational exploration across multiple years? To treat it as process. When we think about a major (or a job) as a series of tasks to complete to get to our vocation as though it is a destination, we reduce our engagement with the world to challenges to be managed or what Hartmut Rosa in The Uncontrollability of the World calls points of aggression. Like students enrolling in only the courses in which they are sure they can succeed and reducing learning to just a grade (see Jesse Stommel on ungrading), we lose our curiosity, openness, reimaging skills, and willingness to learn when we strive to engineer “progress.” As Adam Grant playfully yet rigorously supports in his Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, instead of interpreting intelligence as doubling down on an initial claim, we should practice and embody intelligence as the ability and willingness to rethink.
When students rethink gender and sexuality, they can enhance their understanding of vocation. For example, one NWU’s Gender and Sexuality Studies major, upon reflecting on how the program’s courses shaped their vocational values, writes that because “this course created a broader definition of gender and sexuality [. . .] my understanding of how to ‘help’ has changed. [. . .] I want to work with victims of domestic violence and sexual assault” and “aim to provide queer youth the acceptance and support that they deserve and have always deserved.” Students find entry points into employment that they report are informed by their ethical commitments, such as empathy and being there for others “who are finding their sexuality.” Recent Higher Education data from a Student Voice flash survey show that students want a job or career they love (80%) more than just a job that pays well (58%) or that they can start immediately after college (52%). Their vocational values motivate and develop through numerous jobs and careers.
Approaching one’s life, education, and career with only efficient management strategies sacrifices “resonance,” Rosa argues, a term meaning a shared, focused energy that amplifies and empowers people in collaboration and creates new and memorable meaning. As Richard A. Detweiler found in empirical research about content, context, and purpose in The Evidence the Liberal Arts Needs, the liberal arts experience has a lasting impact on success, leadership, altruism, learning, and fulfillment. These long-lasting impacts start with the resonance that can be experienced in vocational exploration.
In our polarized public discourse about what good education and good leadership look like, our classrooms can be experimental spaces for sustained encounters, expanded community, critical self-reflexivity, and rethinking our purposes in relationship to what the world needs. Arts and humanities professors are well-placed to model this openness to resonance as we encounter the uncontrollability of our campuses’ shifting priorities and our roles in higher education.
Rita Lester is professor of religion and the director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska.
