Teaching is hard. Teaching vocation may be even harder.
It can be tricky to bring a new audience of students, educators, or really anyone into conversations about vocation. It requires true vulnerability—both among participants and from their facilitator—to get folks to think and talk about their past, present, and future; their values and desires; and especially their doubts and fears. We need tools that can help us speak and listen to each other, lowering the stakes of group activities while at the same time increasing engagement in them.
What if I told you I knew of such a tool? In fact, a wonderous tool—one that is inexpensive, widely available and almost infinitely adaptable?
May I present to you: the humble sticky note.
I use sticky notes. A lot. It’s partially because I spent a lot of time working with professional meeting facilitators. There is a longstanding Christmas joke among them that finding sticky notes in your stocking is a disappointment, because you really want a big box under the tree. While they’ve never been on my Christmas list, I find myself using stickies throughout my personal and professional life, from home organizing to course planning to classroom activities.
For educators, sticky notes offer a variety of benefits.
- First, sticky notes make tasks manageable and actionable. If you’ve ever had students stare blankly at a page or a computer screen in response to a discussion prompt, ask them to write one word on a single sticky note instead; it’s a lot easier to get started. Plus, you can have them keep their thoughts organized; I typically ask students to limit themselves to one idea per note.
- They are tactile and physical. Not only do paper notes help us get off our screens and move around a room, but shifting to a vertical plane by attaching notes to a wall can make ideas and activities more interactive and accessible, while still maintaining the portability of other tools like notecards.
- They are equitable, in an obvious sense: every note is the same size, leveling the playing field for ideas and their champions. And yet you can also experiment with different color notes if you want to express difference within this playing field.
I use stickies in class for a variety of purposes. They are a great tool for brainstorming or other idea generating exercises. If you ask groups to start off with sticky notes from everyone, then you can get helpful contributions from even the “quiet” students. And then once you have ideas, you can manipulate them through a variety of physical spaces. I often ask my students to explore classrooms by organizing notes on underutilized walls or unnoticed columns. Or I give them dry erase markers and have them draw connections among notes on a whiteboard.
More importantly, when I ask groups to respond to big questions—like “What matters to you?” or “What’s a label someone might put on you?”—sticky notes help people make connections and find both empathy and support. When everyone’s favorite things are gathered on the wall, it’s very easy to see that we all have many interests in common, like family, sports, and pets. But you can also identify other connections, like shared fears from “getting a good job” to “the world is burning,” opening the door to meaningful conversations about the deeper values behind the words on the note.
How does this work? Psychologists have long recognized the contribution “expressive” writing can make to channeling fears and reducing stress. Jotting down a thought on a small square of paper doesn’t require the same depth as this kind of writing, of course. But in my experience, two features of sticky notes—their compactness and their simplicity—have the dual effect of reducing the scale of big issues (and their associated fears) and removing the barriers to discussing them openly. It might seem like a lot to ask, particularly of traditional-age undergraduates, to share why a commitment to the environment or the label of “horse girl” means so much to them. Instead of demanding that they state their values or define their purpose, I’m just asking them to tell us all about a little square of paper.
As a more concrete example, I often introduce audiences to vocational thinking by asking them to post “what matters” to them. When they survey the resulting array of sticky notes, they are often struck by how few notes refer to their academic or professional pursuits, but instead focus on personal connections, individual passions, or even principles. They might have the same insight using a shared google doc or Canvas whiteboard. But there’s something special about standing side-by-side, facing little squares of paper (instead of each other directly), that can draw people into a deeper discussion about the values and passions that drive them, and how living a meaningful life involves so much more than a job or career path.
One exercise I often use with adult audiences is to ask them to post their earliest memory of what they wanted to be when they grew up. (In kindergarten, I was certain I was going to move in with my friend Kerry Johnson, and we would become firefighters together.) My colleagues are often surprised to find out which one of them had originally wanted to be a mechanic or hairdresser, or how few of their original career plans included academia. There are other ways to foreground our wandering vocational journeys, but sticky notes can pack a lot of insight into just a small square of paper.
Conversations with undergraduate students understandably don’t often share the same depth. With them, I more often use sticky notes to help build classroom community. Students quickly recognize that the relative strangers in their classroom have some of the same values and concerns that they do, while also absorbing that these people also have their own inner lives. Still, some depth is possible, and here is where I especially appreciate the adaptability of stickies. You can ask students to try different configurations—“let’s see what happens if we move these over here”—or even re-use their ideas for an entirely different question. Prompting them to think, “How would you group these labels when you consider what other people see instead of you?” can immediately lead to students openly discussing how we are defined and define ourselves throughout our lives.
I realize that in this particular political and environmental moment, it might seem inappropriate to recommend using more paper. Still, I have found these little squares to be invaluable—for organizing my own life, for various classroom activities, and especially for helping students think about purpose and vocation. Sticky notes help us reduce the scale of the big issues and values that matter to us and make it possible to handle (almost literally) tough topics and to enable discernment more easily.
In terms of modern inventions that help us think about vocation in organized ways: sure, a computer might be helpful, but give me the sticky note any day.
Rich Meagher is professor and chair of political science at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. He is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and a contributor to the upcoming fifth volume from the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project. He is co-author of ENACTING Change: A Handbook for Teaching Advocacy and Civic Engagement. He hosts a local politics podcast, RVA’s Got Issues, for Virginia Public Media.