As I discussed in a previous post, while we rarely use the word “vocation” among our students at Blackburn, vocation nevertheless stands as a General Education Program Student Learning Outcome. Each semester, I teach two courses that fit within this outcome, and I love it. I constantly tinker with the content of these classes to try to find one more reading, one more tool, or one more high impact moment to reach students and help them more deeply engage in the mystery of their personal calling. In this post, I want to share my very best assignment, the one that has proven to prompt the most growth for the most students the most quickly. I share it here for two reasons. First, I encourage you to steal it and use it with your students if you think it could work for you as well as it has for me. Second, I want to explain it as an exercise in stating some of the reasons I believe it has been so effective. Continue reading
Author: Carter Aikin
Advising for Vocation: Ten Touchstones
In March 2018, Hannah Schell discussed the great promise and deep challenges of incorporating vocational exploration into the fabric of academic advising. In this current post, I will pick up where she left off. Many of our NetVUE member institutions have seen the potential for vocational reflection in student advising that Schell discusses. Many, too, are exploring effective frameworks for sustaining programs which do this consistently and effectively. Lots of us are trying to figure out how to do this well. Here I want to address both the promises and the challenges of incorporating vocation into student advising by offering a list of touchstones. Continue reading
Vocation without the “V” word
What do we do when the word “vocation” itself is a problem? Vocation, NetVUE contends, is a powerful lens for undergraduate education. But what’s to be done when our students or our faculty/staff communities don’t much like the word?
For some institutions, an older history with the V-word with a much different meaning proves unhelpful as a platform for new programming. For others, it points to an approach for education which is entirely too theological for the climate of the campus. I work on a campus where care for the student journey of meaning, purpose, and well-being is extremely high. So much so, in fact, that “vocation” stands as one of our General Education Student Learning Outcomes. Our students look to faculty and staff for very holistic formation and we excel in providing it.
And yet, on our campus, if you openly use the word “vocation” or “calling” in a classroom, the conversation stumbles or stagnates. At times, in one-on-one conversations my students may be warm to the notion of a calling, but discussing that with peers in a class setting seems to violate some unspoken social taboo with students at Blackburn College. The V-word just does not fly here. So how do we educate through vocation without the V-word? Continue reading
Chasing the Tail of Providence
My title, “Chasing the Tail of Providence,” is a phrase which has emerged in the past few years as my best touchstone for work with students and with NetVUE member schools in guiding the process of vocational discernment and exploration. It has become a reminder for me of what we are doing, and especially what we are not doing, in educating our students through the lens of vocation.
The phrase is a reminder that we engage with the deep mystery of immanently present transcendence in our work, and that as soon as we name “calling” as our project with students, we connect our efforts with the lofty heritage of Abraham, of Jeremiah, of Paul, of Muhammad, of Ignatius, of Martin Luther King Jr., just to name a few. This is a heritage in which callings would barely be touched by career counseling or personality inventories, but rather where calling means a deeply relational connection with providence, going far beyond knowledge–lived, in fact, much more than known. We claim an engagement with a larger wisdom, a wider pattern, and a deeper grace when we call what we do with our students “the intellectual and theological exploration of vocation” (NetVUE’s stated mission is to foster this). And yet, it is our great honor boldly to wrestle with the mystery of calling with those students under our care.
Whether it’s one-on-one conversation with a student (an irreplaceable setting for vocational reflection, though it runs a bulldozer through our weekly appointment calendars) or whether it’s designing a campus-wide initiative for helping an entire academic community better engage questions of calling, it’s important to remember both the promise and the limit of our enterprise. Continue reading