I have just finished a round of appointments with many of my first-year students and undeclared advisees to help them review their progress and pick classes for next semester. Even as I am blessed with students who are polite, eager, and diligent, some of their expectations create obstacles to having more meaningful conversations about their vocational arc. They often want to prioritize a more convenient, linear pathway—one aimed at a credential they are just beginning to understand. I would prefer to spend time with them discussing a more holistic trajectory: how they prepared in the past for their lives as students, what they are exploring in this present moment, and how they are creating foundations for their futures. Given this tension, this most recent round of advising conversations felt to me like boilerplate sessions of prescriptive compliance.
Especially at this time of the calendar year, I notice that many of my undergraduate students find it challenging to appreciate aspects of time important to their vocational discernment. I’m thinking of the appropriate balance between “fast” and “slow” time, of long- and short-term perspectives, and of being patient and hopeful. But among the challenges they face in understanding time, there is probably at least one that’s on us—and we may be missing an opportunity to help them think more meaningfully about it.
My reflection on the effectiveness of vocational advising has been deepened recently by a careful reading of Rowan Williams’s book Being Human. The chapter “Faith and Human Flourishing” has challenged me to rethink the way I teach time management to first-year students. In it, Williams highlights taking time—that is, using the calendar to recover and reconnect with meaning—as one of four ways to help us develop a definition of human maturity. Williams proposes that our distinct attitudes about time and its passage could be shaped by the rhythms and symbols of a religious calendar.
Tucked into the theme of taking time is a nugget that should recalibrate the way I think about teaching time and its passage. Having invested more than twenty years in exploring the scholarship and teaching of time, I think I’ve mostly taught the topics correctly and effectively. For example, knowing the difference between priorities for action (fast time) and for reflection (slow time) can help our students sort through their vocational options. However, my years in the workforce, first as an employee and then as a middle manager, encouraged me to settle into a false notion about time. I came to understand time as as a commodity—as undifferentiated—and have passed this understanding along to students when I have taught units on time management.
Williams strongly pushes back against the notion of undifferentiated time, which he identifies as part of a late-capitalist, secular framework aimed at acquiring control over the commodity of time and avoiding the wasting of it. Williams prefers to emphasize the giftedness of time, rather than its commodification—to value it as something received, rather than something to be controlled. He thinks that we should be ready “to see the passage of time as symbolic and complex, not just an undifferentiated continuum that has to be filled.”
His argument for differentiated and symbolic time stopped me and forced me to reconsider how I teach students to think about time. In the past, I have indeed encouraged young people in their first-year-experience courses to take control of their time by thinking of it as undifferentiated, using language that identifies it as a commodity that can’t be replenished. But as I reflect on Williams’s thinking, it grieves me to realize that I have been misrepresenting a Christian attitude about time.
Williams reminds Christians that religious people grow, are replenished, and flourish in the patterns and symbolism shared within their community. This implies that our efforts at Christian institutions to form our students should include teaching the giftedness of time—“the sacredness of a time that is given to us for constant, cumulative rediscovery.” Time moves and it changes us, of course, but “at the same time there is something to which [we] return, to rediscover and enlarge the understanding acquired in the passing of time.”
As another liturgical year draws to a close, faithful Christians are reminded by their calendar of the end times—and a time of all things being made new. The church calendar connects them to meaningful language and practices related to experiences of earth and heaven. In higher education, the connection to the rhythms of a symbolic calendar can be a kind of lifeline for faculty members and academic mentors. Haven’t we all noticed how the rhythms of our academic calendars pose annual, crushing threats to the calendars of our faith? In my opinion, faithful members of a Christian fellowship experience this threat most intensely in the seasons of Advent through Epiphany, when fall semesters are winding down and spring semesters are gearing up.
Click hereto listen to the Callings episode featuring Rowan Williams titled “Education, Contemplation, and Joy.”
What about students? How do they adjust to and understand the passing of time in an academic calendar? What does the imposition of an academic calendar mean to their exploration of vocation? My hunch is that the markers and rhythms of the academic calendar—terms, midterms, finals, and registration periods—make it difficult for students to understand the passing of time as a longer, broader arc in their lives. I think that the shorter and more intense starts and stops of the academic calendar encourage them to think of “now” and “the future” in ways that aren’t naturally connected to the organic formation of our vocations.
When we speak about vocation at my (Christian) institution, we emphasize student vocation because we believe that vocation happens in the present—in the situations and opportunities God places before us every day. This means that students have multiple vocations to manage and grow. We also emphasize the other in student vocations: who is the student serving in each of their present, multiple callings? Both of these emphases have the potential to be reminders that students also have multiple calendars, and to encourage them to respect and observe times of recovery, rest, and relationship that exist outside of (or alongside) the rhythms of their academic lives.
Ultimately, we ought to be more intentional in helping our students make a transition in their understanding of time—from the abstract to the really meaningful—in both words and actions. We can holistically infuse their academic experience with language and practices related to vocation—from introductory to capstone courses, from liberal studies to pre-professional degrees, from in-term to out-of-term moments, and from curricular to co-curricular parts of their student experience. We can help them build bridges between the academic calendar and their other calendars, such as the ones that frame their religious beliefs and reflect the values of their faiths. This effort will always be messy, organic, and dynamic; but if we can keep the long and broad arc of passing time in view, we will have helped them better understand time and their own vocational journeys through it.
Paul Burmeister is professor of art at Wisconsin Lutheran College, where he is also assistant dean of advising. He is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow, having been a member of the 2019 cohort of NetVUE’s Teaching Vocational Exploration seminar. For other posts by Paul, click here.
