Insights and Conversations from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE)
The author reflects on a journey with his autistic children, emphasizing the virtues of wisdom and humility. Despite his initial misguided decisions during a trip to the Carrowkeel Passage Tombs in Ireland, he learns valuable lessons from his children. Their insights illustrate how wisdom is cultivated through shared experiences and the acknowledgment of limits.
A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.
Teaching courage, my children echo a call to presence; teaching moderation, a call to self-examination; teaching justice, a call to persistent conversation. The call that is echoed to me by my autistic children with regard to wisdom is perhaps the most important of all.
Continue reading “Echoed Vocation IV: A Call to Wisdom”In his book Undeclared, Chris Higgins criticizes the focus on job preparation in universities and proposes a vocational formation that integrates personal values and ethical understanding into work. This post explores his emphasis on the importance of practical reasoning and ethical considerations in education, and points to ways we might prepare students for a meaningful and ethical life and work.
In his new book Undeclared (available via open access from MIT Press), Chris Higgins usefully criticizes the “jobbification” of the contemporary university. In its place, he describes an ideal of vocational formation that both inspires and has the potential to guide our actions.
The final chapter of Undeclared begins with a familiar dilemma. A humanities department is called to justify their budget and faculty lines (if not its very existence). In response, Higgins offers what may seem like a counterintuitive suggestion. Rather than argue for how the humanities prepare students for the job market, or defend the separation of humanistic inquiry from vocational concerns (even though both have the virtue of being true), Higgins suggests that an expansive vision of vocation can reinvigorate humane learning in our time.
Continue reading “Vocational Formation as Humane Learning: Insights from Chris Higgins’s Undeclared”