Category: Reflection exercises

Giving and receiving advice

Suggestions for how to use “Vocational Advice for Undergraduates” (podcast episode) in your work with students.

What advice would you give to a young adult today?

We ask a version of this question to each of our guests on the NetVUE podcast, Callings. The answers are varied, alternating between encouragement and gentle warning, the pragmatic and the more idealistic. In a “bonus episode” to round out season one, we compiled those words of advice in an episode called “Vocational Advice for Undergraduates.” The advice-givers include Darby Ray, Eboo Patel, Amanda Tyler, Rabbi Rachel Mikva, Father Dennis Holtschneider, and Shirley Showalter. 

At just over 30 minutes in length, the episode offers a taste of the other, hour-long conversations and our hope is that you will go back and listen to the ones that pique your interest, if you have not already listened to the earlier episodes.

Because of its brevity, and because the advice is directed at young adults, you might also consider using this episode in your work with undergraduates. Here are some ideas for how you might do that.

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“Good enough” pedagogy: the importance of interpersonal connections

In Spring 2020, I piloted vocational exploration exercises in a 300-level biology course. Through the difficult journey of that year, I learned that vocational exploration served as medicine for a myriad of woes. Guiding students to explore their purpose supported students’ unmet deep needs. 

In Spring 2020, I piloted vocational exploration exercises in a 300-level biology course. Through the difficult journey of that year, I learned that vocational exploration served as medicine for a myriad of woes. Guiding students to explore their purpose supported students’ unmet deep needs. 

According to the 2020 Faculty Watch Report, 65% of faculty members surveyed indicated that pandemic-influenced course structure changes had a negative impact on educational quality. Yet, seven in ten faculty believe that hybrid or flex models will continue. I am sure this does not come as a surprise given the Spring 2020 mass shift to remote teaching and learning. This was new territory for which we had little or no time to develop novel pedagogy. Many of us found ourselves in a place where we were delivering what we were able to provide—a “good enough” pedagogy. Did we discover some important components to retain? Did we discover critical elements that had not been as obvious in our previous offerings—either important support structures or course elements that need to be fixed?

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Poetry as aid to teaching vocation

What I’m hoping they see in my share of a poem is evidence for a welcoming academic community, where enthusiastic and intellectually diverse faculty make personalized efforts to help them discover their callings in their daily lives. A poem helps me and them step outside ourselves as we talk about getting these things right for ourselves.

“Poetry is having (its) moment,” claims Morgan Hines, in a recent USA Today feature. Her article reports the “moment” owes to the pandemic, to a racial reckoning, and to poets Amanda Gorman and Rupi Kaur. Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate of the United States, thinks poetry may be experiencing a renaissance “coming up from the char,” Hines writes.

I am grateful for a reported surge in popular interest for poetry because I have been using selected poems to teach vocation concepts for many years. Most students think they are poetry-averse, but the right poem, selected and presented as accessible entry to a vocation topic, can be an effective way to complement teaching about vocation.

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Vocation Virtually: Telling Your Story

Understanding this dimension of vocation offers an invitation to become the author of your own story. To do that, students must first discover they have a story to tell. Authoring one’s own story creates agency.

Part 5 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, people, and story.

A fifth metaphor of vocation is story, which underscores the sense that everyone has a story to tell. There is a narrative arc to each life, and that story has a beginning, middle, and end. This dimension of vocation invites students to author their own stories and, in the telling, claim agency. “In the beginning, I/we….” or “Once upon a time, I/we….”  

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Vocation Virtually: The Importance of People

We are all part of communities or groups that claim us, communities that we claim. It could be a family, a faith tradition, a sports team, a choral group. It could even be a campus community like mine, where “We are called |Auggies.” Being an “Auggie” means belonging to a particular community that orients around certain values, like service, intentional diversity, being a good neighbor.

Part 4 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, story, and people.

A fourth metaphor for vocation is people. Vocations are crowded, populated with individuals and communities that clarify our callings. This can happen negatively. “I never want to be like that!” More often, it happens positively. “I admire this person or those people.” Understanding this metaphor positively cultivates the sense that “If you’re with me, I can be my best self.”

The metaphor of people or relationships brings attention to the complex relationship between individual and community. What communities do I claim? And what communities claim me? I belong to my wild and crazy family, even if I didn’t choose them and they didn’t choose me. I belong differently to my university, my professional colleagues, my church community, the people in my neighborhood, my friends and fellow travelers. Again, I chose some of these people; others chose me. In a friendship or marriage, two people continue to choose each other day after day. Each of these relationships marks its members with certain values and certain practices or rituals of belonging. 

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Vocation Virtually: Path, Goals, and Core Commitments

Approaching vocation using path metaphors emphasizes the alignment of goals and commitments. Understanding this dimension of vocation nurtures the sense that “I’m on the right path….”

Part 3 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, people, story.

A third metaphor for vocation is path. Understanding this metaphor cultivates the sense that “I’m on the right path.” One can be called to a path without knowing the final destination. A powerful biblical guide is Abram, whom God summoned to a journey with no more divine direction than “go… to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Abram had to depend on God–not Google Maps!–to get where he was going. He trusted God to get him there.

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Vocation Virtually: Place, Roles, Responsibilities

We can’t always control the roles that choose us, but they are “places of responsibility” nonetheless.

Part 2 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, people, story.

A second metaphor for vocation is place.  Understanding this metaphor cultivates the sense that “I’m in the right place.”

The metaphor of place is most at home in the Lutheran tradition, reflecting Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) revolutionary argument that God equally values all roles, that of parent as well as priest, that of shoemaker or brewer as well as monk or nun. Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) identifies these roles as “places of responsibility,” where one might serve both God and neighbor. In language prominent in the vocation movement in American higher education, theologian Frederick Buechner (b. 1926) defines vocation: “the place God calls you to is the place where the world’s deep hunger and your own deep gladness meet.” 

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Vocation in the Writing Center

Students’ work study can be a meaningful part of their vocation in multiple ways: a calling for them right now; a means to develop professional skills, habits, and confidence; and a part of their reflective process of vocational discernment. When designing curriculum for our weekly training meetings, I try to balance these three goals.

As the director of a Writing Center that is staffed entirely by undergraduate tutors, I believe my first priority is to mentor and support my tutors. While every student on campus can benefit from the Writing Center, the students whose undergraduate experiences are most transformed are the tutors themselves. I have a unique relationship with tutors as both a professor and supervisor, at the intersection of their academic growth and their working lives. Hiring them as first- or second-year students, spending a semester together in training, and then mentoring their work as tutors for two or three years, I have the privilege to form meaningful relationships with tutors that contribute deeply to my own sense of meaning and purpose in life.

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Seeking the Courage to Know What Matters

A reflective exercise that focuses on three points: 1) One creates meaning by living with courage, 2) Courage comes from within oneself, and 3) Purpose requires an authentic commitment to things that matter.

A reflection exercise based on a series of aphorisms

As we begin a new academic year in which we are connecting with students remotely or meeting some of them on campus, we share an overwhelming sense of unpreparedness, stress, and uncertainty. This unprecedented moment is the perfect opportunity to invite students to reflect on how they can meet the demands of our time and find meaning and purpose through courage. 

There is no better time to encourage students to talk about the challenges they face at home and on campus, in their personal lives, and in their relationships with others. We can support students by reminding them that despite the many challenges and limitations they are facing, courage is the virtue through which they can transcend their fears and doubts in order to reach new possibilities. Courage is what makes us able to make possible the impossible.

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Vocation Virtually: The metaphor of perspective

An exercise to use with students developing an electronic portfolio centered on vocation.

Part 1 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, people, story. 

In this post I will share an exercise inviting students to reflect on how they want to “show up” in the world, a phrase—thanks to Rev. Kristen Glass Perez at Muhlenberg College—that captures the dimension of vocation in this important part. The metaphor of perspective emphasizes identity or angle-of-vision. Understanding this dimension of vocation cultivates the sense that: “This is who I am; this is what I stand for; this is who I stand with.”

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