For almost two decades, I taught a course called Created and Called for Community (CCC for short), a common learning course at Messiah University designed for first-year students to explore identity, community, and calling. Despite my ardent enthusiasm for it, I entered my first day of class each spring with trepidation as I anticipated student resistance. “Why do I have to take this course?” they often asked, expressing anything from curiosity to confusion to adamant frustration—as in, “I should not have to take this course.”
On many levels, I understood their resistance. Students experience ever increasing pressure from all directions—parents, peers, and culture—to focus their educational energies narrowly on preparation for lucrative employment. “Return on investment” is such a dominant evaluative frame for a college education’s value that general education courses are often considered something to “get out of the way,” something in which students see no reason to invest their intellectual or financial resources.
In a chapter in At the Time and In this Place: Vocation and Higher Education, I drew attention to the centrifugal tendencies of our current higher education context and suggested that the language of vocational exploration and discernment might address them. In many ways, these centrifugal forces are uniquely detrimental to general education, pushing it to the margins as the focus of higher education spins out in every direction. Just as vocation offers an antidote to the ills higher education faces, the language of vocation is uniquely generative in alleviating the pressures working against a meaningful general education—and not simply for the sake of general education but for our current efforts in higher education to educate for vocation.
Situated in the long arc of higher education’s history, general education is tethered to a wide range of educational claims—breadth, fundamental skills, foundational knowledge, critical thinking, diverse perspectives, essential texts, lifelong learning, and many more. There may be truth in each of these arguments for general education, but taken in isolation, each is insufficient. Even worse, in many of these claims, the central point has morphed into a variety of tired and beleaguered arguments that tend to weigh down general education—and our educational imaginations.
In this four-part series, I consider the broader significance of general education as a space in which to recenter our efforts to educate for vocation—a distinctive opportunity for vocational reflection, discernment, and formation. Questions I will explore include: What are the distinctive contributions of general education to vocational reflection and discernment? How is general education a unique space in which vocational formation can be influenced? And how might we reflect in new and creative ways about this potential?
What are the distinctive contributions of general education to vocational reflection and discernment?
How is general education a unique space in which vocational formation can be influenced?
And how might we reflect in new and creative ways about this potential?
Sparking our vocational imagination will mean placing the arguments for a general education in a larger context, thinking anew about its rich potential for prompting students to ask questions of meaning that lie at the heart of vocational reflection: What makes a life significant? How have my experiences uniquely shaped me? What kind of person do I want to become? What are the deep needs of the world, and how do my talents uniquely align with these needs? What skills do I need to develop to contribute to the common good?
Sparking this vocational imagination will also require breaking through the barriers that we have created that prevent or inhibit holistic vocational reflection. The dichotomy in higher education between professional preparation and general education poses a real challenge, one that wrongly suggests that our “big questions” occur in one arena and “real preparation” for professional roles in another. This dynamic only fuels student attitudes that general education is something to “get out of the way.” Professional aspirations are an important aspect of vocational discernment; students long to understand the concrete and specialized ways they might serve in the world. At the same time, the ideals of vocation encourage us not to stop there. They call us to help students discern a larger sense of purpose and contribution to the world that goes beyond paid work. General education can be transformative at this intersection of profession and big questions, helping undergraduates explore their passions, develop their convictions, deepen their awareness, and ultimately discern their calling—both for their careers and in their broader lives.
As a starting point in thinking anew about general education as a distinctive vocational space, I begin this series by encouraging educators to reflect critically on the ways we talk about general education in the academy—on our own culpability in allowing the general education conversation to devolve. In doing so, I’ll invite us to acknowledge and yet move beyond the inherent tensions that tend to interfere with our efforts to educate for vocation. I hope to challenge us to expand our imaginations to recognize a wider variety of curricular spaces in which general education requirements enhance vocational aims. We tend to default to common learning courses, such as those that draw on classical or core texts, when seeking to engage students in vocational meaning-making. I want to consider how specialized, disciplinary courses—“distribution requirements,” in general education parlance—contribute generatively to vocational discernment and formation. Common general education course requirements, such as Introduction to Communication and History 101, offer avenues to raise vocational concerns and shape vocational sensibilities. Breaking down the walls between “specialization” and “integration,” between “common” and “distributed,” will help pave the way for more curricular creativity.
This past spring, I taught CCC one last time, as the course had been cut altogether in a comprehensive revision of our general education curriculum. I witnessed the full arc of its curricular lifespan, having served on the task force that brought the course into being in the mid-2000s and on the one that recommended it be cut two decades later. This fall, I taught a first-year seminar birthed in the context of our new general education curriculum, a course that pulled some common content focused on vocational formation into a specialized topic elected by the faculty member—a hybrid of sorts. Designing a course that placed common content (chosen by committee) alongside specialized content (selected by individual faculty) was not easy, but the fruits of the labor are promising. Students began their undergraduate experience rooted in a theological exploration of vocation, exploring what it means to love God and to love neighbor. This exploration provided a rich context for considering their particular educational pursuits. Our efforts were guided by shared conversations as educators about vocation, drawing on Living Vocationally: The Journey of the Called Life and supported by a NetVUE Program Development Grant.
We took what we learned over the course of CCC’s curricular lifespan and created something new. And we are encouraged by early reports of student enthusiasm—not only for the course but also for the vocational conversation. In the end, my deepest hope in this series is to explore avenues in which students and faculty might find joy and vocational fulfillment in and through general education—and to offer approaches that build on what we know about the benefits of a general education for the well-being of our students, our universities, and the world in which we live.
Cynthia A. Wells serves as associate dean for faculty development and director of the Ernest L. Boyer Center at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, PA, where she is also professor of higher education. She contributed to the inaugural volume of the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project, At this Time and In This Place: Vocation in Higher Education. A narrative through-line in her vocational story has been the good and creative work of designing higher education spaces—in the classroom, curriculum, co-curriculum, and educator development offerings—that generate vocational discernment and formation. To read more posts by Cynthia, click here.