Category: Series

What Are We Creating Together?

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor.

Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework 

“I was amazed that something so personal like exploring my ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’ in a group could feel so right.”

NWU communication studies student

Last semester, our communication studies department came to realize fully what we had known for years: vocation exploration is something that can and should be done in community. Inspired by our current NetVUE work, we have committed to extending our vocation conversations beyond regular advisement and an occasional instructional nod to using vocation as a primary dialogue topic in several classes in our major and minor. Our department’s guiding principle is inspired by W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen’s “Coordinated Management of Meaning,” which posits that we create meaning and manage our social reality in community. “What are we creating together?” is emblazoned on our brochures and syllabi and even stenciled on our walls as a reminder that we co-construct our environment—we have agency over and responsibility for our co-created relationships. Our students resonate so deeply with this principle that a recent graduate decorated her mortar board with it.

Photo by the author
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The Meaning of Dinosaurs: Embedding Vocation in the Major

This project aims to fill the gaps between introductory vocation lessons in the first-year seminar and culminating activities in the senior capstone to offer students the chance to make connections and discern vocation after declaring a major—typically in sophomore- and junior-level courses such as historical methods.

Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework 

For Joel, it started with dinosaurs. Reading about them, collecting them as toys, and drawing them stand out among his childhood memories. He filled his wandering map with meaningful moments, including the time a teacher gave him a fossil. Ultimately, a circuitous line connecting one history-related experience after another emerged. As he took stock of 20 years of memories, colorfully scattered across a poster board, he saw a pervasive lifetime love of history that inadvertently led him to his undergraduate major.

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Echoed Vocation I: A Call to Courage

As I call to my children, I hear an echoed call from them, uncontained and unpredictable and unsettling, that reverberates back into my teaching.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.

Martin Dotterweich

With this opportunity to reflect in four parts for Vocation Matters, I want to explore something that I have not really noticed until recently: how much my children have taught me about vocation and about the virtues. These posts will describe an echoed vocation. As I call to my children, I hear an echoed call from them, uncontained and unpredictable and unsettling, that reverberates back into my teaching. I write these posts with their knowledge and approval.

I have spoken and written about my calling as a father to my two children, Kathleen and Peter, for many years. That calling has been informed by my calling as a teacher of history, part of which involves presenting the virtues clearly and winsomely to my students. The past not only offers examples of virtue (and vice) but it also calls us to virtues as rememberers of the past. I have tried to teach virtue to my children as well with attention and creativity because they both have autism. In doing so, I have discovered both their unique challenges and their unique insights.

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Introduction: Teaching Virtue and Vocation in History 

Often I’ve found that I carry aspects of the teacher’s call to my children, and—as I’ll explore in my upcoming series of posts—my parenting informs my pedagogy in return.

A series of posts about virtue, autism, vocation, and the teaching of history.

Martin Dotterweich

Vocations inform each other, and two of mine seem to be in constant dialogue, deep calling to deep: teaching and parenting. Often I’ve found that I carry aspects of the teacher’s call to my children, and—as I’ll explore in my upcoming series of posts—my parenting informs my pedagogy in return. I’m sure this is a common experience, but mine has a twist that keeps surprising me. This is because both of my children have autism.

It has been easy to see the ways that my teaching has affected my parenting, and Kathleen and Peter would probably attest with a roll of the eyes that, yes, Dad drags us to places he likes and talks a lot. There exists a video of me explaining a thatched roof to them in which they wander off while I keep talking. It’s on brand. 

More surprising has been how much my call as a parent has shaped my teaching and how much my children shape me as a person. I realize how much I learn from them. Specifically, they have helped me understand something that I teach in my history courses: the four cardinal virtues. 

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Revealing Our “Wild” Experiment

Education for vocation must be a co-creative process highlighting interconnectivity and reciprocity.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

Donovan O. Schaefer’s Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (2022) sets out to dismantle the binary between feeling and thinking. It uses an excerpt from Charles Darwin’s 1863 letter to a botanist as an example: “for love of heaven, favour my madness & have some scraped off & sent me. I am like a gambler, & love a wild experiment.”

Darwin was stirred and led by his excitement much like we have been. For Darwin and ourselves, feeling and emotion are ways of making knowledge and learning a more sensual experience. Everything we learn is thus saturated with feelings of our whole sentient being, our universal self. We are both contributors and participants in life’s wild experimentation. Our series of blog posts displays how classrooms can transform when shaped by

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Let Us Break Bread Together

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives. This is the second of a two-part post; click here for part one.

At Wingate, our approach to Service Learning and Community Engagement (SLCE) is supported by three principles: academic integrity (direct connection of course content with community engagement); student ownership (a student voice in course and project development); and apprentice citizenship (address real problems by learning alongside community partners). The first year Food and Faith course will be a community engaged course and involve all three principles.

Will a community engaged pedagogy have the desired results, namely a positive impact on our students and their vocation pilgrimage as planetary citizens?

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Re-Imagining Life Together (Staying with the Trouble)

Since we cannot escape our interdependence and interconnectedness, we are forced to confront our life together as kin (or “oddkin,” as Harraway says). To re-configure our relations, we must unmake, make, and remake; we must indulge in the work of imaginating, speculating, and fabulating a future for all creatures and life forms. This is not fantasy, but justice.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

This third blog in our series will explore how our pedagogy reflects our belief in Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom. We model our course design and teaching on our belief that we are all interdependent beings living in webs of relations and education for vocation is a co-creative process. We thrive when we live and learn by re-membering these elements of our identities as individuals and societies. This post will focus on our nature as co-creative creatures and how to teach with co-creativity as a guiding principle.

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Ribs and Lungs: What I’ve Learned about Vocation from Young Professionals of Color

If you work as I do in a college community, you know the challenges of helping students see the lungs in the life of learning. Think of the ribs as the deadlines on the syllabus, the grade point averages at midterms, the multiple-choice questions on the final exam. The lungs are all the things that make you want to study something in the first place, all the insights and frameworks that enable laughter in the classroom and the smart hubbub of collaborative conversation.

Craig Mattson has interviewed many young professionals about their work experiences and their lives following graduation. This post is part of a series about what he has learned and how it might inform our work with young adults about vocation.

In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi tells a story about his med-school days when he first tried to read an X-ray image.

At first, he says, he couldn’t see anything but the ribs. In desperation, he sidled up to some seasoned doctors and eavesdropped on their analysis. Oscillating between what they were saying and what they were seeing, Polanyi gradually stopped looking at the ribs and started seeing the lungs.

If you work as I do in a college community, you know the challenges of helping students see the lungs in the life of learning. Think of the ribs as the deadlines on the syllabus, the grade point averages at midterms, the multiple-choice questions on the final exam. The lungs are all the things that make you want to study something in the first place, all the insights and frameworks that enable laughter in the classroom and the smart hubbub of collaborative conversation.

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Table Fellowship: Re-Imagining Vocation

Part two in a series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

In our last post, we asked was whether a cosmic horizon of meaning for vocation––one inspired by Darwin’s entangled bank––would help navigate some campus challenges in a post-COVID world? Our answer was emphatically “yes.” Why? Because a cosmic horizon reveals that we are caught up in inescapable networks of giving and taking, feeding and being fed. Thus, by our existence we are given a place setting at a great cosmic feast and festival. This worldview appreciates vocatio as James Fowler does: the discovery, cultivation, and integration of rich patterns of our whole lives, including our plates, palates, and tables.

Embracing vocation as calling in this context inextricably grounds it in three central tenets: We are all interdependent, we live in overlapping networks of mutuality, and co-creativity is central to life and flourishing. With these tenets in mind, we have developed a Food and Faith course set to unfold in the Fall of 2022. This posts muses on the cornerstone metaphor that grounds our commitment in this course: table fellowship.

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Deep Work and the Problem with Overcommunication

We may need to rethink the cadence of our exchanges with students. Our professorial emails are not just about getting stuff done. We are also preparing students for discourse with coworkers, supervisors, and clients.

I remember in the fall of 2020 hearing our provost say, “Overcommunication with students will be a must this semester.” He was thinking about the challenges of remote learning. But isn’t overcommunication just what professors do? Our over-long syllabi aside, we’re always crafting top-heavy email invitations for semesters of meaningful work. Pressing “send” on over-communication gives us a satisfaction akin to what Shakespeare must have felt completing Sonnet 116.

And then, we receive our first email from a student: “Hey prof thx the class will be dank idk is textbk in or do u class need it?!?”

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