Author: Rachael A. Baker

Vocation and Pedagogy IV: Learning and Discerning in Community

Engaging students in vocational questions should begin even before explicit discussions about vocation occur. Educators can leverage specific skills taught in classes to enhance students’ vocational exploration. In collaborative learning environments, intentional structures, like role assignments, enable students to develop essential listening and interpersonal skills, fostering both academic success and vocational discernment.

Sometimes, engaging undergraduate students in questions of vocation starts before the first explicit conversation about it. As educators, we often teach them specific skills in our disciplinary contexts that can lay a strong foundation for vocational exploration later in their college experience. Taking advantage of these opportunities can strengthen our students’ academic and vocational capacities.

women in white laboratory gown standing in front of a counter
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Few places render confusion more conspicuous than a first‑semester general chemistry laboratory. This first (and sometimes only) lab experience makes it abundantly clear that students don’t know how to work together, regardless of their level of technical skill. The lab setting—its space, structure, and time—intensifies interactions and amplifies students’ insecurities and their interpersonal dynamics (even as the same kinds of interactions play out in small group work and projects in other classrooms). Learning is (and should be) hard, but learning alongside others adds additional variables, making it more complex and difficult. And as students continue to turn to AI for quick and easy answers, the friction of collaborative learning will become even less comfortable and productive.

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Vocation and Pedagogy III: Practicing for Life’s Journey

The integration of vocational education in biochemistry fosters a deeper understanding of character and virtue. By encouraging students to explore questions about their future roles as scientists and healthcare professionals, the approach enhances engagement and comprehension. This shift, while raising awareness of knowledge gaps, promotes profound learning despite a temporary dip in confidence.

scientists in a laboratory
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A series exploring the connections between vocation and pedagogy.

Educating students for vocation means introducing them to a more substantive understanding of a good and flourishing life. It should lead to considerations of character and virtue—ways of being and acting that give meaning, purpose, and direction.  When I first thought about integrating vocation into my teaching, I picked my junior-level biochemistry course. I thought if I could make space for these considerations in this content-heavy upper-level major course, I could find space for vocation in any course. As I contemplated my approach to this work, I wanted to ensure that what I added supported the disciplinary content and fit appropriately within the arc of students’ vocational discernment.

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Vocation and Pedagogy II: Managing Cognitive Load

The author reflects on their early teaching experiences, highlighting microaggressions and their impact on both faculty and students. They emphasize the importance of fostering a sense of belonging for effective learning, linking it to cognitive load theory. By implementing strategies to reduce cognitive load, educators can enhance students’ engagement and vocational development.

A series exploring the connections between vocation and pedagogy.

I still remember the day that a promising student from my biochemistry class stopped by my office to tell me she didn’t think she wanted to be a science professor anymore. She had watched me navigate interactions with disrespectful students and noticed in other classes that some students treated their male professors differently. She worried that she would not be able to manage situations where students questioned her credibility because of her gender. In her own work, she sometimes struggled to focus on content and hesitated to speak up in the classroom, anxious that someone would challenge her as they sometimes did me and that she wouldn’t know what to do. The exclusion that she observed and experienced shaped what she imagined as possible for her future; it also affected her learning.

a woman in blue denim jacket holding her head
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While it might be tempting to dismiss this student as an anomaly, experiences like this are all too common for many students. Students bring many different stories into the classroom with them, and interactions they observe can confirm their beliefs or fears about themselves and their place in an educational setting. Belonging is an essential pre-condition for vocational discernment and for learning. Students need to feel safe and to experience belonging to be able to respond to our invitations to explore their vocations and imagine their futures. Research shows that a lack of belonging—which can include experiencing or witnessing microaggressions—reduces a student’s capacity to learn.

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Vocation and Pedagogy I: Viewing Our Students with Hope

This post initiates a series on the interplay between vocation and pedagogy, highlighting the significance of hope in the classroom. It emphasizes student engagement and the necessity of viewing learners as valuable individuals. By implementing Universal Design for Learning, educators can create inclusive environments that foster vocational conversations and support students’ unique experiences and aspirations.

The first post in a series exploring the connections between vocation and pedagogy.

“What conversations about meaning and purpose do you wish we were having in the classroom?” I asked a group of my senior students and then held my breath. When I first began thinking about vocation, I felt overwhelmed by both the possibilities and the challenges of integrating it intentionally into my teaching. To help me do so, I invited my students to help me understand what they needed so that we could imagine what was possible. They were eager to engage, and their ideas jumped quickly among three elements: the content of the conversations, the possible structures for activities, and the culture of the classroom. As my students shared their thoughts, they connected content and pedagogy in ways that encouraged me to think more carefully about designing possible activities to give shape to and reinforce the unfolding conversation. It was the beginning of my learning journey, which has led to many interesting observations of the reciprocal relationship between vocational exploration with students and general pedagogy.

In this first post, I want to consider vocational and pedagogical hope in the classroom. Students are shaped by the hopes we hold for them and the value we see in them. Engaging vocation invites us to see our students not merely as the receivers of learning but as people whose experiences, skills, and passions have value. It challenges us to consider how our interactions contribute to their discernment and flourishing. To view students vocationally is to embody hope for them, as Paul Wadell so aptly describes. We cannot think vocationally without hope, and the learning spaces we create contribute to communicating that hope to our students.

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