The first post in a series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.
As a high-impact practice, community-engaged learning (CEL) has long been valued for fostering students’ social and personal responsibility, improving their learning and career readiness, and increasing student retention. We argue that CEL has another, rarely examined power: it is a powerful avenue for exploring vocation. In a 2025 webinar, Rachael Baker describes vocation as a capacious concept that stretches into all aspects of our lives, is open to all people, and summons us to consider the flourishing of individuals and communities. CEL nudges students to move beyond their narrow interests to examine their vocation or purpose; the latter is defined by Bill Damon as “a long-term, active commitment to accomplish something that is both meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self.”
CEL is a pedagogical strategy that pairs meaningful and mutually beneficial work in communities with reflection; such engagement ranges from direct service to long-term, capacity-building projects. Regardless of the form it takes, CEL is not paternalistic or one-sided; instructors and community partners collaborate to design projects, partners instruct students about issues and context, and partners benefit through some deliverable. This post is the first in a series on CEL and vocation, which will argue that CEL promotes vocational reflection by helping students explore their talents and interests, challenging them to learn from new voices, and offering them a pedagogy of hope. Future entries will explore how to prepare students who are engaged in community learning to explore and discern their vocations, how to support this process of exploration during their community work, and how to enhance their reflection to deepen CEL’s vocational power.
To begin, CEL enables students to explore their talents and interests. Alongside community partners, students engage in creative problem solving, communicate information to new audiences, and muster the courage to ask questions. They discover new areas of interest, while sometimes letting go of ones they hypothetically thought were interesting. For example, in a CEL psychology course that works with older adults, students may discover a joy in working with this demographic. Through other CEL work, students may uncover their talents in budgeting, designing graphics, managing cases, storytelling, or writing advocacy materials. In this work, students begin to question how they might use those talents in their paid career and in other facets of their life’s vocations. In addition, by working on tangible issues—like environmental protection, children’s literacy, or food insecurity—students grapple with complexity and must learn to contextualize these issues. They see, for example, that combating food insecurity requires knowledge on logistics, agriculture, economics, policy, nutrition, culture, and gender, to name just a few such issues. Understanding such complexity opens new possibilities for students to bring their self-work to the world-work of promoting the common good, to echo Darby Ray’s formulation in “Self, World, and the Space Between: Community Engagement as Vocational Discernment.”
Doing this work ethically requires CEL to be predicated on long-standing, reciprocal relationships with community partners. CEL recognizes that community members serve as important co-instructors for our students, whether these mentors volunteer, work with, or are served by the community organizations who partner with us. These individuals have lived experiences and knowledge that can help students better understand course content and more crucially, life paths. These individuals also help students to question what it means to contribute to a community. As an example, one student collaborating on a poetry project with women in a county jail learned about the dearth of counseling services for incarcerated women in addiction recovery. Combining that newly found awareness with her interest in psychology, the student decided to pursue a graduate degree in counseling and focus her career on serving incarcerated people. Because CEL students engage with individuals on the front line of issues, many are pushed to grapple with vocational questions such as: What is “success”? What do I want to prioritize in my life?
In this way, CEL enables students to hear new voices in vocational exploration, rather than only the same refrains that their parents, relatives, coaches, or professors espouse. As students interact with the volunteers, staff, or clients at community partner organizations, they soon discover that life is not a clear set of steps that lead to a vocational endpoint. These community members recount stories of loss, disappointment, joy, or surprises that prodded them on their vocational paths; they also describe the individuals who mentored, encouraged, and supported them in their own vocational journeys. These individuals also often have specific knowledge about a field (e.g., social work, public health, advocacy) and access to networks and resources that professors, family, or friends do not—thereby expanding the opportunities for students to engage vocational work more deeply.
Building CEL into a course allows all students to experience how vocation “emerges in the doing.” The pedagogy makes one step in the lifelong process of vocational discovery and rediscovery available to all students, regardless of those students’ backgrounds, resources, or personal networks. Using CEL for vocational exploration tells all students that we care about them holistically—not just as students in our courses but also as people in the world. Caring about them means that we recognize the research that Victor Stretcher documents in Life on Purpose: people with a sense of vocation or purpose have better health outcomes, stronger relationships, and fewer mental health challenges; students with a sense of purpose beyond themselves do better academically, according to David Yeager and his colleagues. Helping students live into their vocations makes their lives better; it also makes our world better.
For a generation of students with high rates of mental health issues and loneliness, CEL is a vocational pedagogy that allows students to engage in the forward-moving activity of hope, which requires human relationships to sustain it. According to Norman Wirzba, hope “withers in contexts of isolation, abandonment, or abuse.” CEL situates our students in an entirely different context and allows students to lean into hope, fostering the “conviction,” as Wirzba writes, “that the world needs you.” This conviction opens the door for students to continue exploring who they are, what matters to them, and how they want to contribute to the world. CEL is a pedagogy that “shakes up our categories” about the world, our neighbors, and ourselves. Through it, students practice hopeful vocational work, questioning how they can live for and act on those things that they value while doing and thinking beyond themselves.
Amy S. Patterson is professor of politics and the director of the Office of Civic Engagement at Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of Africa and Global Health Governance and the co-author of Africa’s Urban Youth: Challenging Marginalization, Claiming Citizenship. She teaches community-engaged learning courses in politics, local development, and on semester-away programs.
Heather Brady is professor of liberal arts at Grand View University in Iowa, where she teaches a community-based seminar around topics such as urban design and youth sports. Other areas of expertise include African studies, French cultural studies, and immigration. She is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and received a 2025 Grant to Individuals for her research on bringing vocation to community-based learning. She is also currently leading a Bringing Vocation to Campus Seminar for faculty members teaching major capstone courses at Grand View.
At the 2026 NetVUE Conference (March 19–21 in Kansas City), Heather and Amy, along with two other NetVUE colleagues, will co-lead a pre-conference workshop, “Integrating Vocation into Community-Engaged Learning: From Transactional to Transformative.” Conference registration is closed, but anyone already registered for the conference can add the workshop by calling the Council of Independent Colleges at (202) 466-7230 and asking for a member of the Conferences Team.
