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.
Continue reading “Building a Vocational Praxis of Teamwork”