Category: Series

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.

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.

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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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Connecting Calling to the Dignity of Labor

The author reflects on students’ struggles with vocation and purpose, noting how traditional vocational frameworks can induce anxiety instead of inspiration. He highlights misconceptions regarding identity and achievements, emphasizing the need to evaluate vocational exploration in relation to the dignity of all labor. The series aims to confront these issues and promote a more conscientious vocational discernment for our students.

A series on vocation, the dignity of labor, and the misconceptions that prevent us from valuing all work.

“Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing?” 

Recently, I met with a group of students who were articulating the kind of sincere desires we so often hear in vocational work. One of the great joys in this kind of work with my students—which I’m sure is true for many of us—is accompanying them as they wrestle with these big questions of meaning and purpose. 

At the same time, those questions often come at us like a double-edged sword, because students are not always asking them from a place of deep joy. Frederick Buechner’s classic formulation of vocation, where God calls a person to “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” is inspirational, but it can also induce anxiety. And the students with whom I recently met were asking questions from that place. Instead of being inspired, they were worried that they were somehow getting it wrong. To them, vocation feels hidden and so morally urgent that missing or misunderstanding a calling is tantamount to sin or vice. It seems to me that if the formation programs I lead create angst in my students, I might be doing something wrong. 

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Self-Positioning as Vocational Exploration in Community-Engaged Learning

This post discusses how community-engaged learning (CEL) transforms students’ vocational exploration by emphasizing self-positioning and relational practices. It highlights the importance of understanding one’s identity and context, which fosters authentic connections and transforms perceptions. Through reflective exercises and community interaction, students gain insights into their roles and aspirations, leading to meaningful career paths.

A series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

Our students come to us and into our educational spaces—our classrooms, laboratories, studios, and offices—with different experiences, identities, interests, and talents. Recognizing this dynamic is central to our ability to harness the power of community-engaged learning (CEL) for vocational exploration. CEL is a pedagogical strategy that pairs meaningful and mutually beneficial work in communities with reflection. In our first post, we asserted that CEL helps students explore vocational paths by exposing them to new voices; it enables them to explore their interests and talents within this context and offers them a pedagogy of hope. 

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In this post, we explore vocational practices that elevate student learning within CEL and prepare students to build positive relationships with community partners and fellow learners. We focus on moments in which vocational exploration can strengthen CEL by equipping students to understand their own identities, assumptions, and knowledge about a community. When we integrate opportunities for individual self-positioning, good neighbor practices, and contextual preparation into our CEL courses, students are better equipped to explore their callings in community with others.

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Fostering Belonging through Community-Driven Theatre

The article explores the importance of theatre in fostering community, belonging, and vocational exploration. It advocates for theatre programs to focus on community needs through productions and projects that engage local issues. This approach not only enhances belonging among students but underscores theatre’s role as a vital community resource.

A series on the role of theatre in vocation, with a focus on how it supports community-building, the uncommon good, and vocational exploration and discernment for all our students.

Lights up on STUDENT after campus workshop using theatre to address a community need.

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STUDENT

I didn’t know I could do this with theatre.

Enter AUDIENCE MEMBER who just saw a production created from the workshop.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I don’t see a lot of theatre, but the topic brought me here. . . I learned stuff I had no idea about and I’m now asking what can I do.

Lights fade.

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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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Unlocking Vocation through Community-Engaged Learning

The post introduces community-engaged learning (CEL) as a powerful method for vocational exploration, emphasizing its role in developing students’ social responsibility and career readiness. By facilitating meaningful interactions with community partners, CEL encourages students to discover their talents, question personal priorities, and engage in reflective practices to deepen their understanding of vocation.

The first post in a series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

As a high-impact practice, community-engaged learning (CEL) has long been valued for fostering students’ social and personal responsibility, improving their learning and career readiness, and increasing student retention. We argue that CEL has another, rarely examined power: it is a powerful avenue for exploring vocation. In a 2025 webinar, Rachael Baker describes vocation as a capacious concept that stretches into all aspects of our lives, is open to all people, and summons us to consider the flourishing of individuals and communities. CEL nudges students to move beyond their narrow interests to examine their vocation or purpose; the latter is defined by Bill Damon as “a long-term, active commitment to accomplish something that is both meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self.”

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W.E.B Dubois’s Vocational Legacy: Inspiring Justice and Activism

This post examines W.E.B. DuBois’s vital contributions to sociology, emphasizing his insights on race and marginalization. The post highlights that DuBois’s legacy inspires students facing challenges in academic and professional settings. His concept of double consciousness helps validate minority experiences, empowering students to navigate oppressive systems and pursue meaningful vocations.

The final post in a series on how the great sociological thinkers from the past can help us understand the struggle of today’s students as they explore and discern their vocations.

Until recently, W.E.B. DuBois was not considered one of the founding fathers of sociology. In The Scholar Denied, eminent sociologist Aldon Morris documents how and why academic institutions and leaders have downplayed DuBois’s ideas over the past century. Despite DuBois’s significant achievements, Morris argues that scientific racism prevented him and his work from being recognized as foundational to the discipline of sociology. Today, however, his contributions to the discipline—including methodological innovations, pioneering insights in the sociology of race, and empirical studies of African-American communities in the United States—are seen as central not only to sociology, but to public sociology, a tradition which unites scholarship and activism. His sociological insights into these areas also provide important ways to approach vocational exploration, especially for anyone responding to the call of justice and for the students with whom we work who are marginalized or minoritized.

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Understanding the Student-Athlete Transition: Opportunities for Vocational Conversation

This post discusses the challenges student-athletes face during the transition from sports to life after college, highlighting issues of identity loss, depression, and social disconnection. It advocates for supportive conversations about vocational paths and emphasizes the importance of understanding these unique challenges to help student-athletes navigate their new realities effectively.

The first post in series on vocation and student-athletes.

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In the third semester of my graduate studies, I realized it was not for me, and I needed to call home to discuss dropping out. It was the first time ever that I had not wanted to attend school; in fact, I had been looking forward to the focused coursework. I had always planned to go to graduate school, but what I couldn’t account for were my feelings of being lost and disconnected. I finished my bachelor’s in May and started graduate school in July, so there was little time to process my undergraduate experience. There was even less time to process the loss of my athletic career, something that had been a driving force in my life for a solid decade. I played three sports a year from the seventh grade until I graduated from college. My identity as an athlete was deeply ingrained in my mind—it was how I identified with the outside world and how the world acknowledged me. When I graduated, that part of me seemingly stopped, but I had no way to understand what was happening.

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Creating a New Narrative for Theatre: Theatre as Vocation

This post discusses the importance of theatre as a vocation that fosters community, self-discovery, and resilience among students. It challenges common myths about theatre being a frivolous or unviable career by highlighting its diverse career possibilities and the life skills gained through theatrical training. The author advocates for recognizing theatre’s true value.

A series on the role of theatre in vocation, with a focus on how it supports community-building, the uncommon good, and vocational exploration and discernment for all our students.

Lights up on theatre professor’s office. STUDENT sits across from PROFESSOR, tears running down their cheeks. PROFESSOR is used to this, has multiple tissue boxes around.

STUDENT

All I’ve ever wanted to do is theatre. But my parents said they’ll disown me if I major in it.

PROFESSOR

Why are they against it?

STUDENT

They say I won’t get a job, I’ll be poor. They think it’s not a real career, it’s just a hobby. They don’t take it seriously.

PROFESSOR offers tissue box as scene fades to black.

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Breaking Free from the Iron Cage of Rationality

The discussion emphasizes students’ financial motivations when choosing careers, highlighting the influence of Max Weber’s “iron cage” of rationality. This focus can overshadow values, creativity, and purpose. While some students prioritize money, others seek balance, suggesting a potential shift in career perspectives that educators can encourage for a better societal future.

A series on how the great sociological thinkers from the past can help us understand the struggle of today’s students as they explore and discern their vocations.

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Colleagues and I have recently been interviewing students to learn more about how they think about vocation. One question has generated especially striking responses: “If money was not an issue, what would you do the first year after college?” Explicitly asking students to do the unthinkable—to set aside their overwhelming concern about money—opens whole new worlds of possibility. One student I spoke with said that she would want to be a teacher if money was not a concern; she would love to work with young kids, but has eliminated that possibility because she knows that early childhood education does not pay well. Even though students do not always have the most accurate sense of how a major in the liberal arts can be a foundation for financial success, they know that (at least from a financial standpoint) they are at college so that they can get a “good job.” This focus on money is entirely rational; but where do feelings, values, a sense of purpose, and the greater good fit?

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