A series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.
Our students come to us and into our educational spaces—our classrooms, laboratories, studios, and offices—with different experiences, identities, interests, and talents. Recognizing this dynamic is central to our ability to harness the power of community-engaged learning (CEL) for vocational exploration. CEL is a pedagogical strategy that pairs meaningful and mutually beneficial work in communities with reflection. In our first post, we asserted that CEL helps students explore vocational paths by exposing them to new voices; it enables them to explore their interests and talents within this context and offers them a pedagogy of hope.
In this post, we explore vocational practices that elevate student learning within CEL and prepare students to build positive relationships with community partners and fellow learners. We focus on moments in which vocational exploration can strengthen CEL by equipping students to understand their own identities, assumptions, and knowledge about a community. When we integrate opportunities for individual self-positioning, good neighbor practices, and contextual preparation into our CEL courses, students are better equipped to explore their callings in community with others.
Self-positioning helps students to see that their individual identities matter in their vocational discernment and that these identities play a role in how they engage communities. As Darby Kathleen Ray writes, vocation involves the “effort to discover and cultivate one’s authentic self, as well as everything that brings it alive.” Part of this discovery entails the realization that, as Henri Tajfel and John Turner observe, people tend to categorize themselves and others into social groups based on various characteristics (e.g., religion, race, partisanship, nationality), with these identities overlapping and dependent on context. Communities that form based on shared identities can promote belonging and purpose, but they also can foment unconscious biases, discrimination, “othering,” and conflict.
To uncover their authentic self and engage meaningfully with others, students need to explore their identities and their communities and build a foundational awareness of themselves. This critical examination helps our students see how they are perceived in the community. For example, one of us has recognized that self-positioning can enable upper-income students from well-educated families to better understand how students’ service in surrounding communities could be perceived as patronizing or paternalistic, particularly since the university lies in a rural part of the state with lower-than-national-average income and education levels.
Vocation, though, involves more than the internal work of discovering and cultivating the self. This task, Ray argues, must be coupled with “efforts to understand and transform the systems of thought and practice that contest and undermine the world’s goodness and integrity.” Self-positioning at various points throughout the semester enables students to consider the relationships, structures, and systems that affect them and the world—what Ray terms the “symbiosis” of self-work and world-work. To facilitate this awareness, instructors can ask students to share their name and other information about themselves (e.g., major, hometown); in this exercise, students reveal something authentic about themselves and situate it within systems of thought and practice. A similar process occurs when students complete an identity pie chart, the rivers of life exercise, or use the NetVUE conversation cards.
Instructors can then use journalling, think-pair-share activities, or group work to help students dissect meta-themes from their experiences: What does their river of life, for example, reveal about their passions, gifts, and interests? Instructors also might situate some self-positioning exercises in a disciplinary context, as Rocío Mendoza and her colleagues did when they asked science students to reflect on their identities. By repeating these exercises and building on them over the course of the term, students forge friendships and create ties of mutual accountability—practices that also embody vocational work beyond the self. At the term’s end, students can bring together their journal entries and in-class notes on vocation into what Sherry Hamby terms a self-reflexivity statement.
All this work on self-positioning helps students to recognize that vocation is a dynamic, ongoing process that engages both self-work and discernment about how to make the world a better place. Vocational exploration is inherently relational: We cultivate the authentic self and bring goodness to the world through our ties to others. In the context of CEL, instructors can urge students to reflect on specific ways to cultivate those relational ties. How can they be good neighbors? What would the practice of patience, humility, curiosity, and empathy bring to those relationships?
A colleague shared a story with one of us that illustrates the transformative power of answers to these question. A student in their CEL course recounted that being on time, consistently showing up, readily admitting his mistakes, and eagerly completing mundane tasks at a local sports program enabled him to gain the respect of some skeptical youth. The student’s practice of good neighborliness was foundational for the relationships that then pushed him to recognize his own love of teaching and his calling to work with urban youth. Implicit in the student’s description was the centrality of listening when doing community work. The Greater Good Project at U-Cal Berkeley and Erica Brown at Yeshiva University describe some class activities that can help students to practice these listening skills with humility, empathy and respectful curiosity, while journals and periodic short discussions can help them continuously reflect on how well they actually listened. Without practicing good neighborliness, students may never gain the trusted relationships central for exploring life purpose and the hope embedded in world-work.
The vocational project of collaborating with others to work toward a transcendent, common good requires knowledge about the community’s context, history, issues, and resiliency. By reflecting on their social positions and engaging as intentional good neighbors, students will be more open to recognizing how often society ignores the social, familial, aspirational, navigational, and linguistic capital of marginalized communities. (For more on this topic, readers will find this article by Tara J. Yosso instructive, as well as well as the 2022-2023 NetVUE Big Read, The Purpose Gap by Patrick Reyes.) Panel discussions with community leaders and partner organizations can help uncover how these forms of capital foster resiliency and creativity, as can exploring partners’ websites, newsletters, annual reports, and media stories. Short scaffolded assignments (such as journal entries, reflective papers, or flash presentations) can allow students to share insights about the context and reflect on how this knowledge deepens their ability to work as good neighbors with others around a shared purpose.
As James and Margaret Plewes-Ogan describe when they faced a life-changing diagnosis and the adversity that accompanied it, vocational paths are uncertain; ultimately, though, they are rooted in a deep hope that change is possible and an insistence that we transcend the self. Such dynamics were evident when students signed up for a health policy class with one of us. As they worked with a free medical clinic, the students learned about issues of health access, the ways family members often provided needed care, and the role of the clinic in linking patients to pro bono medical treatment. They heard stories of patients who lacked access to much needed medications and physicians frustrated by low political commitment to public health.
This knowledge shook up several students’ vocational trajectories. Some reevaluated their career plans: one decided to pursue public interest law and another planned to follow her passion for community health work. Others questioned how they would act in their vocation as citizens in our country’s political system. All recognized that CEL had led them to explore who they were and how they wanted to contribute to the world. But those lessons surfaced because the students learned to position themselves in relation to these social realities, to practice being good neighbors, and to gain contextual knowledge about these social issues—all of which contributed to their dynamic, unfolding vocational journeys in important ways.
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 Des Moines, 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 2026 NetVUE Grant to Individuals for Vocational Exploration 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.
