Author: Stephanie L. Johnson

Articles of Note: Building Career Readiness

Two recent Inside Higher Ed pieces challenge us to consider how successfully we are preparing students for life after college.

In Career-Readiness Initiatives Are Missing the Mark, Matthew T. Hora (UW-Madison) suggests that many job-readiness initiatives on college and university campuses are not effective in part because  of “an overreliance on off-campus work-based learning as opposed to more accessible work-integrated learning in the classroom.” In the classroom, faculty can contextualize soft skills and build an equitable and inclusive environment, which is much different from exclusionary off-campus internship programs. He offers suggestions for academic departments to incorporate career-readiness into their curricula.

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Responding to Hora, Matt Reed reflects on Career Services in his latest post for Confessions of a Community College Dean. He advocates for faculty engagement with Career Services and the overt discussion of transferable skills in the classroom. “Faculty members who engage with career centers, and who share those lessons with students, can make an enormous difference” in the lives of students, he writes.

Stephanie L. Johnson is the editor of Vocation Matters.

Shaun Casey on Diplomacy and Hope

In a new episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speak with Shaun Casey, founding director of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. State Department.

In a new episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings, hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speak with Shaun Casey, founding director of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. State Department.

Shaun’s work explores the overlapping concerns of religion, diplomacy, and public life. Trained as a theologian with an interest in public policy, Shaun held multiple academic positions before he was called to his work at the U.S. State Department by Secretary of State John Kerry. “I want to be a faithful disciple,” he says, “wherever I end up.”

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Thema Bryant on Finding Home

In this conversation, Thema Bryant discusses liberation psychology, the relationship between faith and therapy, the healing power of poetry and dance, and the opportunities and limitations of social media in vocational discernment.

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings features Thema Bryant, president-elect of the American Psychological Association. Thema is a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Los Angeles; a professor at Pepperdine University, where she directs the Culture and Trauma Research Lab, and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The American Psychological Association awarded her the Emerging Leader of Women in Psychology Award in 2007 for her scholarship and clinical work on violence against women, and recognized her for Distinguished Early Career Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest in 2013. Her most recent book is Home Coming: Overcome Fear and Trauma to Reclaim Your Whole Authentic Self. She also hosts The Home Coming Podcast.

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The Call of Lyric Poems

Lyric poems call us to attend to the world differently, to see differently. Their condensed, compelling use of language can offer something essential about being in the world that can shift our vision. While that shift may be complex and even painful in the best of times, it’s a more-than-sufficient reason to teach poetry in our classrooms.

Poems are scattered throughout the scholarship on vocation—or at least excerpts from poems—so much so that I’m not worried about the death of poetry any time soon. But why teach poetry as we discuss vocation with students? A host of recent articles have suggested what poetry can offer the general reader, especially in a global pandemic: solace (“The Importance of Poetry in Challenging Times and How to Teach Students About It”), rejuvenation for a dwindling attention span (“Books Briefing: If Your Attention Span is Shrinking, Read Poetry”), a boost to creativity (“How Poetry Shakes Up the National Desk’s Morning Meetings”). But even if we don’t disagree with these suggestions, most of them are not sufficient reasons for teaching poetry to undergraduates even if they suggest pragmatic ends for reading it.

We might start to answer the “why” by listening to what students tell us about their experience with poetry prior to college. Many students have been taught a Romantic expressivist theory—that poetry is the passionate expression of the poet’s personal emotions—and thus think of the lyric as the poetic norm, whether they recognize it or not. The simplest marker of a lyric would be the “I” who expresses feelings or perceptions about human existence—William Wordsworth’s speaker, reclining and lamenting “what man has made of man” while feeling pleasantly sad in a birdsong-filled grove, for example (“Lines written in Early Spring”). Students don’t often consider that the “I” is a construct, that the emotions expressed are not unfiltered outpourings onto the page, or that poets revise and revise and revise to achieve, among other things, rhythm and sound patterning. So how might teaching students to consider the lyric differently contribute to our discussions with them about vocation?

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The Art of Adaptation

Our lives are a series of adaptations, not only as we continually reshape ourselves to new forms and contexts but also as we embody each state of being newly shaped. As we are re-purposed over and over again, we must rearticulate our vocations as well.

Even without reading recent studies of Americans’ streaming habits, we’d probably all guess that far more content is being streamed now than prior to the pandemic. I’ve been fascinated by the number of adaptations available on streaming services both in back catalogs and as original content: adaptations of novels, of movies, of comic books, of biographies. Adaptations are as old as narrative itself (the oral tradition is an adaptive tradition), but the presence of streaming content in our lives seems to make them newly ubiquitous. For those of us who love adaptations, streaming services provide treasure after treasure. It’s a fascinating genre, offering us the familiar and the alien simultaneously—creating within us a kind of comfortable discomfort that doesn’t seem too risky. 

Lithub’s 40 Best Literary Adaptations to Stream Right Now

As a genre, adaptations can help us shape conversations about vocation. While it may not seem odd to say that we adapt to new situations, it may sound very odd to say that we are ourselves adaptations. Yet this may be useful. The word “adaptation” has multiple definitions: the action of adapting one thing to another; the state of being suitable for a particular purpose or place; a revised version of a text or other creative work. In its multiple definitions, it signifies both process and product. Our lives are a series of adaptations, not only as we continually reshape ourselves to new forms and contexts but also as we embody each state of being newly shaped. I think that most of us have a sense of self that at its core seems constant—a kind of source text that is unchanging—but also conceive of ourselves as changing over time, as not being the same person as we were years ago. As we are re-purposed over and over again, we must rearticulate our vocations as well.

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The Limits of Self-Help

When we discuss vocation and calling with undergraduates, are we peddling a version of self-help?… Without dismissing the important activities of self-reflection and value formation, we might turn students’ attention beyond those activities to the here-and-now of their “unhelped” selves and to the present work that they can do for the common good. We can remind them that their calling is to the present moment—to their relationships, work, and communities in the now.

Self-help literature has had an amazing shelf life. From medieval morality plays to Renaissance courtesy books to Victorian conduct literature to contemporary best-sellers, it pushes transformation while itself being continuously transformed. On Amazon today, anyone beginning a search for self-help will find 28 different categories for browsing. The S’s alone tell us volumes about our culture: Self-Esteem, Sex, Spiritual, Stress Management, Success. 

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Narrative Expectations

The trope of “narrating one’s life” not only privileges the past but also rests on the value-maximizing equations of decision theory when we try to attend to the future. What if we are not sure who we will become? How do we act and further the plot without full narrative control over our stories?

In all of my literature courses that include British modernism, that first short story on the reading list inevitably prompts the question, “where’s the rest of it?” James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf—all rejected previous narrative forms and instead structured their early twentieth-century fiction around heightened “moments of being,” to use Woolf’s term, or “epiphanies,” to use Joyce’s. Because nineteenth-century narrative form still dominates our expectations, however, modernist fiction can seem plotless and pointless to students. We want a narrator who guides and interprets for us and we expect rising and falling action, hinged by conflict.

But is realist fiction actually realistic? Does it reflect our lived experiences, or does the modernist innovation of the literary epiphany—those heightened moments of significance around which narratives are structured—offer us a different realism? If fictions provide insight into the human condition and stimulate the moral imagination, then a modernist disruption of our narrative expectations can offer students a different, possibly more “real” narrative understanding of their own lives.   

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