Storylines about generative artificial intelligence played key roles in the most recent seasons of several award-winning television shows, as viewers of The Comeback, Hacks, and The Pitt can attest to. These storylines are not surprising: AI is reshaping everything in our world from art and commerce to education and health care, and more pointedly, labor protections related to AI were a key feature of the 2023 writers’ strike in Hollywood. AI has also impacted higher education, itself full of events, institutes, seminars, conferences, and statements, with resources for faculty, staff, administrators, and campuses to engage in conversations about AI.
Given how AI has come to fill every nook and cranny of our culture—and likely your campus and professional life as well—what unique contributions does NetVUE bring to this conversation?
Admittedly, when I began to think about the relationship between generative AI and vocation, I initially thought that AI should be nowhere near vocation work. By “vocation work,” I mean the messy, vulnerable, and transformative human work of discerning who we are and what we are called to do in this world. I mean an understanding of vocation that sees it as multiple (we are all called to do and be many things at once and throughout our lives), dynamic (it changes as we change and as the world changes), and perennial (it is a lifelong process of discernment and engagement).
But then I realized it was not only impractical to avoid talking about AI and vocation, but I wasn’t thinking capaciously enough about the relationship between them. AI has already become a part of our culture, our relationships, and our professions—and especially a part of the technology in our pockets. But this sudden shift doesn’t mean that we should just give up and go along with it without exercising our agency. I started to ask bigger questions to gain a wider perspective and to make sense out of it all, recognizing the transformations that are occurring while exploring the resources that we can use (and identifying those we don’t have) as we do so.
What follows here are some words of permission to talk about AI, which could provide a roundabout way to hope. Naming the issues honestly can also open an invitation for conversation about who and what we are collectively called to do and be in the world today. Through this discussion, we might be able to transform, deepen, and expand how we think about AI, much in the way that NetVUE has done with “vocation” itself.
Three things help me name what we already know from this network and connect it to conversations about AI:
1: The NetVUE Slow Down
One of the key things that NetVUE offers is that it gives institutions permission to slow down and take the time they need to define vocation in a particular context: to understand institutional culture and mission, to transform teaching and learning, and to redesign curriculum—and to do so in community. NetVUE resources and opportunities already focus on gathering people together to read, to eat, to travel, to talk, and to listen. So, too, can NetVUE offer this gift in relation to conversations about AI, especially when it seems that everyone is already breathless and behind.
For it seems that we have all been told that we are “behind”—that we’re not where many corporate workplaces are, or that we must move fast and get AI into classrooms or our advising, or loaded onto our learning managements systems or students’ phones, or … !!! But I urge us to slow down. Remember that we are often pushed to move fast by people who are selling us a product or a suite of software. But we must pause and ask, what is our “why?” Why are we doing whatever we’re doing in relationship to AI? What missional commitments guide conversations and decisions about adopting AI tools at our institutions? How do we make space for students to discern the best roles for AI to play in their learning and in their lives? These kinds of conversations emerge from what I call the “NetVUE slow down.”
Additionally, if our campuses are committed to land acknowledgements, related reparative work, or our planet’s well-being through sustainability initiatives, how does the undeniable catastrophic environmental impact of AI disconnect us from the important work that these obligations call us into? To slow down is to be countercultural right now, which might be just what we all need.
2: Not Merely Utilitarian
In the same way that NetVUE’s approach to vocation, broadly speaking, shifts the focus away from solely utilitarian career-prep conversations, so should NetVUE help us shift our critical conversation on AI away from the merely instrumental. When it comes to vocation, we have become accustomed to broader discussions about lives well-lived, frameworks and values for decision-making, and expansive understandings of meaning and purpose in our lives that are inclusive of careers but not limited to them. When it comes to AI, the conversation often starts with these kinds of questions: How do I prevent students from using it? If we’re using it, which bot should we use? How could it be used effectively in class? What is the best policy to adopt?
But these questions miss a much larger picture. In the same way that we move vocational conversations through a focus on careers and jobs and toward broader and deeper discernment, we need to move through transactional questions about AI toward a more profound engagement with it. We need to reflect more fully on the process of teaching, to revisit our understandings of what learning looks like, to reconsider the classroom as community, and to support effective advising relationships. We must also proceed authentically and transparently when it comes to decision-making processes at the institutional level by identifying the values and practices that shape and guide leaders regardless of the tool or policy being considered. When some of us worry about the incursion of AI into teaching and learning, what precisely are we afraid of losing? Naming these valuable parts of our work will help us recommit to them.
3: Defanging AI
I fully recognize the corrosive impact that AI is having on our humanity—and even of the “capital E Evil” (in the words of a colleague) that it may be. But what if we, at least conceptually, position AI not as a big storm cloud looming over our lives and robbing us of our ability to slow down and be purposeful? What if we position it as just one of the many factors involved in discerning a life’s meaning and purpose and affecting our collective vocation work?
Generative AI isn’t even the only “capital E Evil” that we and our students face and wrestle with every day. Women have learned to survive patriarchy and resist misogynistic attempts to control and demean us. Queer and transgender people have persisted in the face of genocidal regimes intent on their destruction. Black and Brown people have found a way out of no way with each iteration of structural racism throughout the generations. Young people routinely confront economic indicators predicting their certain failure and persevere with hope of making a difference in the world. All of us are navigating the climate crisis, violent and divisive politics, personal health challenges, and a myriad of other existential threats. Yet we fold them into our conversations with students every day and into our concepts of vocation and discernment. What if we look to some of the tools and strategies that we have already developed to survive the unsurvivable? AI is just the most recent threat on the scene, albeit one that rises at the intersection of many others.
Through NetVUE, we join each other and share a commitment to student flourishing. We have access to powerful frameworks and resources that enable us to meet clear and present dangers. Drawing on them—which have already positively shaped the way “vocation” shows up on our campuses—we can navigate together the challenges that AI poses with a healthy dose of defiant hope.
Caryn D. Riswold is professor of religion and the Mike and Marge McCoy Family Distinguished Chair in Lutheran Heritage and Mission at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. She serves NetVUE as a senior consultant helping institutions navigate the vocational challenges of generative AI. For more posts by Caryn, click here.
