A series of posts on integrating vocation into a gateway course for the major, featuring conversations between a professor and her student.
One of the biggest challenges we faced at St. Norbert College when we redesigned our gateway course for English majors was deciding how much scholarship from the field to include. Our answer? We scaffold engagement with research by asking students to integrate literary criticism selectively into a short research paper, saving more comprehensive methodological investigations for later courses. We also introduce the scholarship of vocation into our discussions about calling and literary studies. Creating this vocational context has helped our students cultivate deeper meaning within the major and set them on journeys of increasing purpose, embedded in community.
Deirdre: I teach research and scholarship as an academic dialogue. As my students develop as scholars, I encourage them to practice habits of collegial conversation to build new insight, just as we do in the classroom. As they read literary criticism and incorporate others’ interpretations into their own original arguments about literary texts, they better understand scholarly inquiry. To help students better understand key vocational concepts, they also read texts by Fredrick Buechner and Mary Oliver to consider how identity and calling are intertwined. We analyze selections from John Neafsey’s A Sacred Voice is Calling to understand calling as social conscience and that vocation is more than identifying and matching one’s skills with a career—it means listening well to the world’s needs. We examine Neafsey’s engagement with Michael Himes and Buechner to model how critics converse with one another to build interpretations. And we discuss Patrick Reyes’ The Purpose Gap—specifically the section, “Hero’s Journey So White”—to see how stories told from a dominant culture’s perspective overlook the richness of our collective culture and weaken the literary canon.
Caroline: When I enrolled in this course, I was an English and business major who liked reading but hadn’t yet considered literature as a lens for vocational discernment. That changed over the semester. The mix of literary analysis, vocational reflection, and exposure to faculty research helped me shift from asking what I wanted to do to asking who I wanted to become. Unexpectedly, this course led me into a deeper process of vocational discernment that reshaped my academic path.
Deirdre: Even as these readings on vocation have helped students discern their own sense of purpose, they have also shed new light on the literary texts I have been teaching for years. The vocational focus has allowed my students to understand these works more authentically within a scholarly conversation. In the past, I taught Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow as a relatively nontraditional novel of formation that dramatizes the internalized racism, collective trauma of slavery, and strategic amnesia that its main character Avey Johnson faces. Within Reyes’ vocational framework, the novel reveals with more nuance the ever-changing callings that characters respond to over the course of their lives. Perhaps more importantly, it shows that for Black characters, the call to connect to one’s ancestors requires evaluating dominant cultural institutions. This perspective has encouraged my students to see the main character not simply as a victim of a racist structure, but also as an active agent in her own vocational story.
Similarly, a set of three plays I have taught for years received new life in the context of this vocational focus. I have often taught Antigone, Trifles, and Fences as three separate takes on familial connection and justice that are particularly suited to staged performance. Now, the final essay in the course asks students to situate their analysis of these plays within the context of vocation and make an argument about these playwrights’ collective representation of how vocations are discerned, enacted, and matter in the world.
Caroline: When I read Praisesong for the Widow, I began to see how Avey’s journey reflected a deeper search for meaning. I found myself drawn to the spiritual dimensions of her transformation—how she seemed called into a life of connection and purpose. That was the first spark. Later, in our major essay on Fences, Antigone, and Trifles, I argued that tragedy arises when people are blocked from fulfilling their callings, whether by societal pressure, family obligation, or unjust systems. This assignment helped me give language to the intuitions I’d been developing, not just about literature, but about my own life: I started to reflect more seriously on what kinds of work would allow me to feel aligned with my values, how I wanted to show up in community, and what it might mean to live with integrity and purpose in a complicated world.
Deirdre: One way I model for the class the vocation of scholarly inquiry is to ask them to attend and reflect on a research symposium we host, where professors present their social justice-oriented scholarship as a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In the symposium, I have presented my own scholarship on modern Black writers’ critiques of interrupted and thwarted calling, such as Countee Cullen’s vocational sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel,” which describes the racial impact of such unfulfilled callings.
Caroline: Watching my professor present on thwarted callings in Black literature showed me what it looks like to pursue research that’s both intellectually rigorous and rooted in justice and community. I began to see how academic inquiry could shape not just how we think, but how we live. Inspired by the symposium, I built upon my work in class and applied for and was accepted into our college’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) the next year.
I spent that next summer working with Dr. Egan-Ryan and reading works by authors like Toni Morrison and Nella Larsen. I asked how literature reflects and reimagines what it means to be called, especially in the face of historical and systemic barriers such as race. It was an intensely rewarding experience. For the first time, I designed my own questions, shaped my own research arc, and contributed to a larger scholarly conversation that I first encountered in our gateway course.
But undergraduate research isn’t just about independent research, it’s also about building a community of inquiry. Ten of us lived on campus together throughout the summer. We had daily communal lunches where we shared updates on our projects and asked each other questions, our conversations often stretching well beyond our disciplines. I learned about research in psychology, Spanish, business, and biology, and these exchanges helped me see how different fields tackle similar questions about purpose, justice, and human flourishing. This experience expanded my sense of what calling could look like across different fields. This interdisciplinary, communal approach modeled the kind of learning that I now know I want to be part of.
This research project profoundly shaped my academic path. I began choosing classes not for convenience, but for their deeper resonance. I sought courses that challenged me and spoke to my interests in justice, identity, and community—like Mass Incarceration, Marriage and Family as Vocation, The Modern Middle East, and The Harlem Renaissance. These classes weren’t just academic—they became personal steps in my vocational journey, offering me language, frameworks, and mentors to keep discerning what it means to live a purposeful life.
Deirdre and Caroline: Now, co-authoring this blog feels like a full-circle moment for both of us. What began in an introductory English class grew into a collaborative research partnership and a summer of deep vocational exploration. We’re still asking, together, how scholarship and calling might intertwine—not just in theory, but in the real work of building a meaningful life.
Deirdre Egan-Ryan is the director of faculty development at St. Norbert College outside of Green Bay, WI, where she is also professor of English. She is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and was part of the inaugural cohort of NetVUE’s Teaching Vocational Exploration Seminar. Her essay, “Community-Based Pedagogy, Literary Studies and Vocation,” appears in Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies and grew out of her years directing the program in academic service-learning and community engagement at St. Norbert. Her many vocations include rescuing overlooked big dogs and laughing with her teenage sons.
Caroline Van Sistine is a rising senior at St. Norbert College. A double major in English and sociology, she is interested in gender, race, intersectionality, and vocation in modern literature. She works as a consultant in the St. Norbert Writing Center and also interns at The Green Bay Press Times. Last past summer, she was awarded a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship and worked with Deirdre Egan-Ryan on researching narratives of vocational flourishing in modern Black literature. A former gymnast, Caroline discovered one of her vocational passions for reading novels as she rehabilitated from an ankle injury.
To read the previous posts in this series by Deirdre and Caroline, click here.