Author: Heather Brady

Assessing Community-Engaged Learning to Deepen Vocational Reflection

The final post in this series discusses the impact of community-engaged learning on students’ vocational exploration. It emphasizes the importance of reflective practice in fostering deeper learning. By revising assessment strategies and prompts, the authors enhanced students’ understanding of teamwork and intercultural competency, leading to meaningful civic engagement and a greater sense of personal responsibility within their communities.

The final post in a series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

As educators, we want to know that our efforts impact our students, but assessment is difficult, especially when we seek to measure learning about vocation. It requires that we—alongside our students—engage in “continuous, connected, challenging and contextual” reflective practice, as recommended by one practitioner’s guide. Our last post illustrated how teamwork can be a kind of vocational praxis, offering students the opportunity to discover common ground in community with others. In our final post, we describe the outcomes of Heather and her colleague Erin Olsen-Telles’s learning, paying particular attention to the impact of embedding reflection in community-engaged learning on students’ vocational discoveries. By redesigning assessment strategies, we came to understand that reflection grounded in community contexts empowers students to engage in the deeper learning that opens the door to vocational discernment.

serious african american male with planner on city riverbank
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Building a Vocational Praxis of Teamwork

This post explores how community-engaged learning (CEL) fosters vocational exploration through teamwork. It highlights the transformative potential of collaborative experiences, enabling students to enhance communication skills and discover their personal and communal responsibilities. Real-life examples illustrate how teamwork can significantly impact personal growth and understanding of vocation as a shared journey.

A series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

silver and black pens on a black surface
Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA on Pexels.com

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.

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