Category: Series

Practicing Purpose and Joy: Vocational Discernment for Faculty Members

This post concludes a series on faculty thriving and highlights the importance of cultivating purpose and joy for faculty members in higher ed. Drawn from insights from the volume the authors edited, it suggests that flourishing requires a rethinking of purpose and joy as practices, not destination, as well as a supportive institutional culture to cultivate well-being and fulfillment.

A co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

Last spring, we came across this image on Instagram (great oracle of wisdom that it is), posted by the Open Discovery Institute (ODIN), that summarized the “benefits of staying in academia after PhD.” Without putting too fine a point on it, the things that many of us might hope for (a fair salary, holistic wellbeing, good mental health, and vocational confidence in the future) were not included on the pie chart. In fact, as a close look at the chart suggests, it’s unclear what the actual benefits of remaining in higher education are. Compared to ODIN’s usual posts, which receive hundreds and sometimes a few thousand likes, this post received over 26,000. Clearly, it struck a chord.

As we conclude our series on pursuing purpose and joy as faculty members, we want to offer encouragement to our faculty colleagues in higher education, pushing back on the gallows humor that many academics, including ourselves, indulge in when we talk about our vocations. Our previous posts focused on faculty burnout, why our limitations are important, and how friendships help sustain us. Our final post reflects on cultivating purpose and joy.

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Good Enough Faithfulness

This post highlights the pressure to achieve in higher education and offers an alternative to this mindset. It emphasizes the importance of embracing life’s messiness and acknowledging conflicting callings. Instead of striving for perfection, it suggests fostering gratitude and recognizing “good enough” actions to cultivate a meaningful vocation in different life seasons.

A series drawing on a therapist’s insights into play, wandering, and presence in relation to vocational exploration and discernment.

Humble callings upon an early rise, easy to cast aside.
The glory in a student’s struggle—how to uniquely guide?
A thoughtful intellectual, with time and curiosity to give,
An ideal image that often collides with how most of us actually live.
The simple truth is our lives are full, with care and needs each day.
How easy to critique, dismiss, and belittle the impact of our way.
The calling is not perfection and meeting every need,
The calling is rhythm, reflection, and goodness of the deed.

—Carrie Caudill

Achievement and optimization mindsets have become deeply ingrained in the culture of higher education. My own internal script often demands, “Go, go, go! Grade those papers. Make this class content more interactive. Don’t forget about applying for that grant proposal. Oh, and look on Amazon—your son needs a new lunch box. Don’t forget to respond to the Meal Train request, and the committee meeting is in 15 minutes, so you can do something in the 13 minutes before you log on to Teams. Go!”

scattered papers and broken pencils
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“It Changed My Life”: Centering Relationships in Communal Living

The Anne Devenney House at Fordham University provided young adults like Gina Ciliberto with transformative experiences through intentional living and community engagement. This inclusive environment fostered relationships, deepened purpose, and supported vocational exploration. Despite its closure due to financial reasons, the impact on residents’ lives and their ongoing connections highlights the value of such communities.

A series on the impact of intentional living communities on young adults as they explore and discern their vocations.

Gina Ciliberto lives in Yonkers, just blocks from the New York City borough she loves: the Bronx. In 2012, Gina graduated from Fordham University. During her sophomore and junior years, she lived at the Anne Devenney House, a university-sponsored, off-campus community that bridged the gap between students and their neighbors in the Bronx. Asked how the community impacted her, Gina simply said, “It changed my life.” 

Members of the Anne Devenney House community sharing a meal.

The Anne Devenney House began as a project of Fordham’s campus ministry. Although it didn’t require religious affiliation, all seven residents in the first year of this intentional community identified as Roman Catholic. Living together in a standalone house a few blocks from campus in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood, they committed to the three areas of the program: community service, campus outreach, and intentional community within the house. There were mandatory dinners together once a week, but they often shared meals informally.

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The Attention Gym II: Stretching to Listen

This post discusses enhancing students’ listening abilities through class discussions, emphasizing the contrast between dialogue and conversations that function more as disconnected monologues. It advocates for viewing the classroom as an “attention gym” to strengthen active listening skills, essential for vocational discernment. The text also highlights practices to promote a culture of attentive listening among students.

A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.

When I talk with students about the purposes of class discussion, I often show them the dinner scene from my favorite Sandra Bullock film, While You Were Sleeping. I ask them to describe what they observe about the quality of the conversation happening around the dinner table, and especially to note who seems to be listening. This scene helps us distinguish between dialogue, a method of building on each other’s ideas, and conversation that proceeds more like a set of disconnected monologues (however humorous).

Students often zero in on a key difference between the two. They note that in a dialogue, participants actively listen to understand each other. In the other kind of discussion, people listen for a break in the conversation to make space for their own voice.

It is easy to make the case to students that listening is hard, and as a culture, we are not very good at it. It is harder to explain how we can get better at it. Naming the classroom an attention gym—as I described in my first post in this series—provides the framework to highlight attention as a key resource in becoming a better listener. Class discussions then become the training ground for workouts in listening.

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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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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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Vocational Ambiguities: Confronting Contradictions in The Merchant of Venice

The second post in a series on Shakespeare, pedagogy, and the power of literature to help us navigate ambiguity in our callings.

woman in historic costume with poetry book
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By most estimations, reading Shakespeare carries little value as career preparation. No one—not even English majors—will be asked in a job interview to prove what they know about Shakespeare. But while knowing the content of his plays may not mean much, I’m convinced that the process of reading them may very well shape our vocational trajectories.

It did, at least, for my student MR.

Aspiring to attend law school, MR was gregarious and relational, always willing to engage and converse and dressing with a zany flair. But underneath this whimsy was a penchant for precision. They liked things crystal clear and were uncomfortable when they were in shades of gray, especially when it came to assignments and grades. In their eyes, a black-and-white answer could always be deciphered if we just took enough time to find it. This love for exactitude was both an asset and a liability for an aspiring attorney.

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Thriving in Academia: The Power of Friendship and Community

Faculty members at small liberal arts colleges often experience isolation despite a focus on community. This post emphasizes the importance of developing friendships and academic partnerships for personal and professional growth. Connections with peers, mentors, and colleagues from other institutions foster resilience and collaboration, ultimately enhancing scholarly productivity and overall well-being.

A co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

One of the seeming paradoxes of faculty life at a small liberal arts college is that although these institutions often champion community, faculty members frequently work in isolation. And despite the fact that research and publication have become increasingly collaborative, higher education has a tendency to view the “life of the mind” largely as an individual pursuit. University tenure and promotion criteria often reinforce this view, rewarding individual work over more collaborative projects—particularly in the humanities. Within this context, collaboration may be further inhibited by the fact that faculty are frequently hired as one of a few experts—and sometimes as the only one—in their discipline or sub-specialty. A recent article from Inside Higher Ed suggests that the key to scholarly productivity for faculty members working at teaching-intensive schools is to just be more efficient, side-stepping these other very real constraints.

In this post, we encourage faculty members to cultivate a kind of scholarly resilience that doesn’t expect you to do more with the same number of resources; instead, we should build resilience by generating “wealth in people” that we gain through belonging to a community, as Christine Jeske describes in her essay in the volume we edited, Purpose and Joy: Pursuing a Meaningful Career in Christian Higher Education. Friendship within academic communities can take many forms, but we focus here on generative friendships—what we term “academic partnerships”—that encourage personal and professional growth, and thriving. As Paul Wadell writes, “One of the great unpayable debts of friendship is to realize that our friends helped us become better than we ever could be by ourselves.”

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“To Be Idle and Blessed”: A Wandering Path for Vocational Discernment

This post emphasizes the therapeutic benefits of nature walks for vocational exploration. It highlights how being “idle and blessed” fosters self-reflection, creativity, and deeper understanding of one’s calling. Citing historical and scientific evidence, it encourages incorporating mindful walks into daily life to promote clarity and personal insight in a busy world.

A series drawing on a therapist’s insights into play, wandering, and presence in relation to vocational exploration and discernment.

I first came upon the tantalizing phrase, “idle and blessed,” in Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day”:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

It is in such unhurried states—with an open heart and peaceful mind—that callings often stir. I have found that nature walks offer a practice of intentional “idleness,” which allow the mind to wander and reflect, to stir rich self-understanding “blessedly” and to deepen vocational discernment.

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Vocation and Intentional Communities

This post discusses how intentional communities, particularly in college settings, foster a sense of purpose and belonging for young adults, influencing their vocational paths. Alumni profiles highlight transformative experiences, as seen with Katerina Sasieta from Knox College, who credits her communal living at Green Oaks for her career as an arborist.

A series on the impact of intentional living communities on young adults as they explore and discern their vocations.

In the spring of her sophomore year, Katerina Sasieta lived in the woods of the upper Midwest. Halfway across the country, Gina Ciliberto spent her sophomore and junior years off campus in the Bronx. Neither were alone; they’d joined intentional communities sponsored by their colleges. Years later, Katerina and Gina are both clear: if they hadn’t found purpose and belonging in those communities, they might have transferred or dropped out of college altogether.

On the lake at the Green Oaks campus.

An intentional community is a group of people who live together and share values, goals, and a lifestyle. From pilgrim colonies and convents to hippie communes, intentional communities are a unique part of American history. The distinctly American blend of religious freedom, freedom of expression, colonialism, and entrepreneurship has produced many utopian experiments.

In this context, American colleges and universities have also experimented with intentional community as an alternative model for student housing. Intentional communities may increase student retention, belonging, and affinity. As a former ministry coordinator at DePaul University and a long-time resident of intentional communities, I’ve seen how communal living can transform young adults.

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