A series exploring the connections between vocation and pedagogy.
Educating students for vocation means introducing them to a more substantive understanding of a good and flourishing life. It should lead to considerations of character and virtue—ways of being and acting that give meaning, purpose, and direction. When I first thought about integrating vocation into my teaching, I picked my junior-level biochemistry course. I thought if I could make space for these considerations in this content-heavy upper-level major course, I could find space for vocation in any course. As I contemplated my approach to this work, I wanted to ensure that what I added supported the disciplinary content and fit appropriately within the arc of students’ vocational discernment.
Biochemistry students typically plan to go to medical or graduate school, and they are often quite anxious about getting the preparation they need to be successful. These students often worry about questions like: Will I learn enough to help me pass the MCAT? Do I like this enough to study it in graduate school for five to six years? Will I really be able to make it as a scientist? Their gaze is set firmly on future career choices, such as becoming a doctor or a scientist— or occasionally, getting to graduation and never thinking about science again.
As Paul Wadell and Charles Pinches remind us, one of the most fundamental questions that should anchor our vocations is: What kind of person should I become? Even in a course with many other demands, I wanted to broaden the vocational questions that students were prioritizing. I wanted students to ask themselves: What kind of scientist do I want to become? What kind of work in health care would best allow me to use my gifts and talents? What have I gained from the study of science that I can carry forward, even if I never work in scientific fields?
The work of scholars Elaine Ecklund and Jason Baehr also proved helpful as I identified a list of virtues that not only supported my students’ vocational exploration but were also essential for their learning and their future as scientists. I chose virtues—humility, attention, courage, and gratitude—that I considered important for scientific work but hadn’t yet made explicit in the classroom. In my experience, students didn’t understand how to move from a broad vision of these virtues to making intentional choices that would allow them develop habits and shape their character over time. In collaboration with some colleagues, I developed some postures and actions that I suggested students might use, and that—if developed into habits—could help them cultivate these virtues. We not only discussed these practices, but I also made space and time for students to do them together in the classroom. Students noted that by trying out these practices as a community—what became a shared project of experimentation—we were able to reduce barriers to their engagement.
In the first semester that I tried this approach, I focused on humility. (See one of my previous blog posts for more on this experience.) In this course, we discussed the importance of humility for learning and working in the sciences. Then students had two weeks to try practices that would help them cultivate humility. Through written reflection and classroom discussion, we explored the students’ experiences and how they were imagining possibilities for their futures. The conversation was rich and challenging vocationally, but it also felt relevant to the course content and student’s current questions. Students also started to engage more deeply in our scientific discussions. As their engagement shifted, they also became better at thinking like a biochemist. As the course neared its end, I was eager to see how the students would do on the final exam.
Every year, I gave a very similar final exam in this course that challenged students to apply what they learned throughout the semester to new scenarios. It also allowed me to track their performance over multiple years, and this particular year didn’t disappoint; the final exam scores were significantly higher than in previous years. However, the course evaluations suggested something different, especially students’ response to this statement, in which they ranked this course relative to their other classes: “The amount I learned in this class was …” Biochemistry scores had always been very high in this area, and students typically reported that we covered quite a bit of content during our time together. But this year, the score on this question was much lower than it had ever been before, even though this group of students demonstrated more mastery than any previous group.
What explains this potential discrepancy? The science of learning offers helpful insights. In Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, the authors describe what they call the “illusion of knowing.” “When we’re incompetent,” they write, “we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change … To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress.” The authors explain that novices overestimate their own competence and don’t learn as effectively because they aren’t aware of what they don’t know.
The practices that I introduced to broaden my students’ vocational questions also raised their awareness of their own understanding of the content, thus highlighting gaps in their knowledge. Students felt less confident at the end of the semester because they were more aware of what they didn’t understand, yet they did better because that awareness opened them to the opportunity to learn more. We had broken some of the illusion of knowing and created more space for deep learning to occur through engaging in intentional practices together. The higher engagement and mastery persisted when I repeated this work with students in subsequent semesters.
As we accompany students on their learning and vocational journeys, it is important to remember that students do not always come to our classrooms with foundational skills necessary for either. By pairing the practice of certain virtues with learning the content of courses in our disciplines, we can help students develop skills that support both these goals. The purpose of this work is not to shape our students into a particular type of person or direct them toward a single way of thinking, but to cultivate space where they consider questions of vocation alongside the content of what they’re learning in their disciplines. Positive encounters with such practices within the classroom can increase the chance that students will continue this work outside it—especially as they learn to live out their vocations.
Readers interested in exploring the connection between the practice of virtues within other disciplinary contexts might find these posts helpful: For more on the classroom project described in this post, see this post and the series it is a part of. For a discussion of empathy in the discipline of English, see “Hope through Connection III: Cultivating Skills as Vocational Discernment,” by Deirdre Ryan-Egan and Caroline Van Sistine and its accompanying series. To explore how we might cultivate dissent in our work, see Kathleen T. Talvacchia’s post on this topic. Finally, Kiki Kosnick’s “Vocation in the World Language Classroom,” provides another example worth considering.
Rachael Baker is the associate director of NetVUE. For more posts in this series by Rachael, click here; for her other posts, click here.