A series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.
As previous posts in this series have illustrated, community-engaged learning (CEL) is a powerful pedagogy for facilitating vocational exploration. This post builds on those insights to show how opportunities for teamwork in CEL projects can further deepen vocational work. Most faculty members recognize that teamwork enables students to construct knowledge together, simulating the kind of collaboration, problem-solving, and communication that is ubiquitous in professional environments. Indeed, teamwork promotes the vital skills that the National Association of Colleges and Employers heralds, which include the following:
- Careful listening,
- Understanding and asking appropriate questions,
- Managing conflict and making compromises,
- Interacting with and respecting diverse viewpoints and personalities
- Meeting ambiguity with resilience and agility,
- Meeting one’s responsibilities, and
- Developing strong, positive working relationships.
But teamwork also empowers students to discover their gifts and talents, to consider their life purpose, and to examine how their life journeys are, as Erin VanLaningham writes, not “singular paths,” but rather roads intersecting with and affected by others. Teamwork shows how our lives are “called forth by others,” in Jason Mahn’s framing, because it enables us to build new relationships in purposeful communities. This post provides an example of an intentionally designed teamwork experience in a CEL seminar to show how this high-impact practice of collaboration can be marshaled for vocational discovery.
The transformative potential of teamwork became evident when I, Heather, began teaching a new CEL seminar on youth sports. In partnership with a local elementary school, my students—many of them athletes—teach sports or games to fifth graders in a physical education class. Grand View students work together to develop lesson plans, practice the lesson with their peers in class, receive feedback, teach on site, and reflect on the process. Students teach at different points in the semester; and as they build on the insights of previous groups to design their own lessons, they recognize the power of teamwork. In one reflective exercise, for example, Kayla and Cierra (not their real names) observe that they became sources of support for each other as they taught youth how to collaborate and communicate effectively through a blindfolded obstacle course. Their partnership helped fifth graders explore, in their words, “how to work together, then reflect on various strategies of teamwork, specifically verbal and non-verbal communication.”
As they debriefed these kinds of experiences, the Grand View students underscored that their sense of responsibility for peers, youth, and the larger community made them feel more invested in their learning. They learned to listen to others: they heard feedback, received it graciously, and adjusted their lessons, all of which allowed them to show up energetically for each other and for the fifth graders. This outcome echoes VanLaningham’s point that “conducting ourselves with our neighbors is a way to consider vocation’s relationship to the common good.” Our partnership—a community of Grand View students, fifth graders, teachers and staff—became stronger and more unified over the semester. This “connected culture” in the classroom laid the groundwork for a thriving team outside of it. Although some students initially worried that their lack of teaching or coaching experience would undermine the project’s success, their emerging relationships and connectedness helped them gain confidence and equipped them to thrive. In the process, they recognized what Catherine Fobes describes as a key vocational lesson: understanding that “human lives are linked, influencing one another’s transitions and trajectories.”
In the first iteration of the course, I did not intentionally design teamwork to foster vocational exploration. This focus evolved organically through a reliable pattern of partnership, reciprocity, and shared learning. The second time the course was offered, I made this focus more explicit (which illustrates a distinct point about how interactions with students also expand our vocational learning as instructors). My intentional focus enabled students to develop a more expansive understanding of vocation as a communal responsibility. For example, James, who taught handball with his partner, developed a more precise vocabulary as he came to appreciate that teamwork made it possible for them to interact meaningfully with fifth graders—not just monitor their behavior. For Elise, collaboration with her partner freed her to teach the kids to “play fair and work together as teammates.” She enjoyed being a role model, or in her words, “someone to look up to.”
A vocational approach to teamwork also enabled students to understand how their journeys are not fixed or set but rather altered and deepened by transitional experiences, turning points, and key encounters. In one reflection, Lincoln describes teaching wrestling techniques to fifth graders with two of his teammates who were also in the class. A star wrestler who grew up in a bustling urban area outside Iowa, Lincoln acknowledges the many contributions that others made to his vocational development. He writes about his own personal growth through hard transitions, a process facilitated by the community he has built on campus with his team and coaches. Like some of the fifth graders he taught, Lincoln made important sacrifices to gain access to elite training in the best wrestling program in the region. But he also recognizes that such a path would have been impossible without the help of family members who commuted long hours. In his eyes, vocational journeys are complex, shifting, and contextual; they are shaped by relationships and connections that then allow us to encounter the world beyond the self.
As my students began to develop a more precise vocabulary of purpose and calling that helped them articulate their expanded understanding of teamwork, I began to see how the pattern of shared civic action, followed by reflection, constituted a vocational praxis. It was the collective action coupled with a shared practice of reflection that made this vocational learning experience transformative. This practice showed up perhaps most profoundly in Lincoln’s ability to reflect on and share his life journey, Latine background, Christian faith, and leadership philosophy with others. His authentic sharing created a humanizing bridge with the youth and allowed him to openly engage with them despite their diverse situations and backgrounds. As he writes, the opportunity to see youth impacted by his vocational journey, in turn, inspired him: “They were very invested in everything we were saying. . . . I know they will take the values and lessons and even wrestling techniques back with them, if they choose to.” Through his experience of civic engagement, Lincoln became attuned to the shared purpose of teamwork. When he recounts his vocational journey to others, he moves beyond the narrative of individual achievement to understand and respond to the narrative of his calling. While student-athletes like Lincoln practice teamwork regularly on their athletic teams, they are hungry to connect the different kinds of teamwork and, for that matter, different parts of their lives through purposeful reflection.
As these stories show, experimentation with teamwork in its diverse shapes, forms, and nuances in our courses has an enduring impact on students, serving to awaken or attune them to what Brené Brown calls the “granularity” of emotional experience and connection to others. Through a vocational praxis of teamwork in the context of CEL, we create an intentional space for building social connections and humanizing relationships where students can start to trust their neighbors. This shared sense of responsibility for others inspires students to show up for each other and to commit to each other in small and big ways, further helping them recognize the ways vocation revolves around connections to others. Vocational exploration encourages students to integrate the different experiences, periods of their lives, transitions, relationships, and parts of themselves. Teamwork makes this more likely to occur.
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. In 2026, she also received the Seed Coalition Award Civic Educator Award and the Grand View Award for Innovative Teaching.
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.
For other posts by Amy and Heather, click here.