The article discusses the integration of vocational discernment into a physics course at Pacific Lutheran University, inspired by a faculty workshop. Students engage in activities to explore their values and career paths alongside academic learning. The author emphasizes the importance of considering your cultural commute and the broader implications of vocational choices on your community of origin.
A series exploring the teaching of vocation in physics.
“The new vocation section was by far my favorite portion of the course and greatly impacted my post-university goals.”
“I wish I had done this assignment my first year of college.”
Students in my physics capstone course at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) shared these comments in their course evaluations about the new vocational curriculum that I introduced the last time I taught it. After reviewing these course materials, a colleague also wrote, “I am SERIOUSLY impressed by all that you have done with this course! It is amazing and I wish I’d had training like this when I was in college.” As a professor, there are moments when you know you’ve created something impactful. This was one of those moments for me.
The series explores how historical sociological thinkers illuminate contemporary student struggles in finding their vocations amid societal challenges. This post highlights themes of anomie, technological disruption, and moral ambiguity affecting students’ mental health and identity. Educators are urged to model adaptive behaviors and foster discussions around these challenges to support student well-being.
The first post in a series on how some of the great sociological thinkers from the past can help us understand the struggle of today’s students as they explore and discern their vocations.
I start every class meeting by asking my students, “How are you all doing today?” This is not a rhetorical question. I expect students to respond and express a feeling, a thought, even a complaint. At the beginning of the semester, I usually get positive responses—smiles or, “Doing good.” At mid-semester, the tone drastically changes. Students avoid eye contact, and the few who do respond say things like, “Stressed,” or just give me looks of quiet desperation.
What is going on? Do I happen to teach at an institution with an unusually depressed student population? I suspect not. I do not think the issue lies within the individuals whom I teach, but rather within the social context that deeply impacts their experiences in patterned ways.
Creative writing pedagogy offers valuable insights for vocational teaching across disciplines. By emphasizing storytelling, community feedback, and personal narrative, educators can guide students in reflecting on their vocational journeys. Creative writing pedagogies foster specificity, helping students articulate their experiences while navigating challenges like self-doubt and imposter syndrome.
A series of posts on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.
At a recent workshop on vocation at my university, I heard a colleague use a beautiful metaphor to describe the vocational journey: “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love this metaphor, and it’s one I know well as a creative writing instructor because the original quote refers not to vocation but rather to writing. This metaphor’s source is a Paris Reviewinterview with American novelist E.L. Doctorow, in which he describes the writing process.
It’s not surprising to find wisdom about writing popping up in conversations about vocation. After all, when we ask students to reflect on their vocational journeys, we’re usually asking them to tell a story about themselves, and creative writing is the discipline of storytelling. That’s why—in this post and those that follow—I offer several frameworks, tools, and activities from the field of creative writing that instructors in any discipline can use as they integrate vocation into their teaching and advising.
At St. Norbert College, an English gateway course integrates literary scholarship with vocational reflection. Professor Deirdre Egan-Ryan and her student Caroline Van Sistine discuss how this approach reshaped students’ understanding of literature and their personal callings. Reading texts on vocation led to deeper academic engagement, community building, and a redefined sense of purpose within their studies.
A series of posts on integrating vocation into a gateway course for the major, featuring conversations between a professor and her student.
Deirdre and Caroline
One of the biggest challenges we faced at St. Norbert College when we redesigned our gateway course for English majors was deciding how much scholarship from the field to include. Our answer? We scaffold engagement with research by asking students to integrate literary criticism selectively into a short research paper, saving more comprehensive methodological investigations for later courses. We also introduce the scholarship of vocation into our discussions about calling and literary studies. Creating this vocational context has helped our students cultivate deeper meaning within the major and set them on journeys of increasing purpose, embedded in community.
In this post, Jason Mahn expresses feelings of frustration and burnout amid challenges in teaching, which include lack of student engagement, prison lockdowns disrupting classes, and international students facing visa issues. Drawing on Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Mahn reflects on the gap between ideals and reality, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging despair while fostering hope.
My work as an educator has felt Sisyphean of late. Just this past week, I’ve experienced some acute frustration and setbacks, not to mention an overarching sense of fatigue, ineffectuality, and even cynicism.
Monday afternoon, I found myself walking up the stairwell toward my classroom remembering the apathy in the students’ faces the prior week. I was dreading another session during which I would try—too hard!—to be and sound excited and engaged. I stopped and mumbled aloud to myself: “I don’t want to be here.”
This series of posts explores integrating vocation into gateway courses, highlighting discussions between professor Deirdre Egan-Ryan and her student Caroline Van Sistine. Focusing on vocational discernment within English enhances students’ understanding as members of a guild, equipping them with critical skills like effective communication and problem-solving, which prepare them well for the workforce. As they cultivate these skill and apply them in real-world setting, they also clarify their future aspirations.
A series of posts on integrating vocation into a gateway course for the major, featuring conversations between a professor and her student.
Deirdre and Caroline
Gateway courses typically focus on discipline-specific training, assignments, and formation. When we emphasize these foundational habits in the context of vocational discernment, our students begin to recognize that they are members of a guild, with its craft and notions of purposeful living made more apparent. As they enter this community, students become more able to apply their disciplinary knowledge in contexts that help them name and own those skills in ways that resonate with their emerging sense of vocation.
The post discusses the interplay between vocation and mythos, exploring how personal and cultural narratives shape individual identity and calling. It advocates for a critical examination of inherited stories, encouraging reflection and rewriting as means to align one’s life with values of love and justice. Mythos serves as a guiding framework for vocational discernment.
A series of posts on the relationship between vocation and rhetoric, focusing on how ethos, logos, pathos, and mythos offer a fresh perspective for creatives, educators, and scholars to conceptualize their professional and personal callings.
Reginald Bell, Jr.
In rhetorical terms, mythos refers to the stories that shape how we understand who we are, where we come from, and what we are called to become; these stories center the deeper cultural and spiritual narratives that frame both individual identity and collective belonging. The roots of mythos lie in the Sophist tradition of pre-Aristotelian rhetoric, in which storytelling was seen not just as persuasion, but as a means of conveying truths about the human condition. Not only a rhetorical appeal, mythos is also a way of being—helping us locate ourselves within larger moral, communal, and historical arcs.
The certainty of death and taxes, famously noted by Benjamin Franklin, is challenged by modern realities. Wealth disparities skew tax compliance, while transhumanists envision overcoming mortality. Authors Burkeman and Beal argue that confronting our finitude enriches lives. Ultimately, recognizing life’s limits prompts meaningful existence and societal responsibility.
When Benjamin Franklin popularized this saying in 1789, he was referring to the new American Constitution, which he believed shouldn’t be considered certain or permanent, at least not without the active participation and vigilance of its citizens—a republic, he suggested, if we can keep it. Absolutely nothing is certain—not even the bedrock of our nation’s democracy—except for death and taxes.
This post explores the intersection of vocation and rhetoric, emphasizing the role of pathos in education and personal development. It discusses how emotional engagement fosters vocational discernment and inspires students to connect deeply with their aspirations. The author highlights the importance of creating inclusive spaces for storytelling and critical reflection on social issues.
A series of posts on the relationship between vocation and rhetoric, focusing on how ethos, logos, pathos, and mythos offer a fresh perspective for creatives, educators, and scholars to conceptualize their professional and personal callings.
Pathos has always been a powerful force in my vocation as an educator and scholar. It serves as a bridge between logic and human experience, allowing us to connect with others on a deeper emotional level. In my view, pathos is not merely an emotional appeal but an essential component of how we discern our callings and live with purpose.
This content explores the relationship between vocation and rhetoric, emphasizing the importance of logos in vocational reasoning. It discusses how educators can use critical thinking to guide students towards ethical decision-making and align their career aspirations with communal values, ultimately inspiring them to become agents of positive change.
A series of posts on the relationship between vocation and rhetoric, focusing on how ethos, logos, pathos, and mythos offer a fresh perspective for creatives, educators, and scholars to conceptualize their professional and personal callings.
As one of the three classical rhetorical appeals, logos often takes a backseat to ethos and pathos in discussions of vocation, but it is no less critical in shaping how we understand and teach vocational exploration and discernment. Logos refers not only to the logical structure of an argument; it also represents the reasoning that underpins our actions, the ethical implications embedded within that reasoning, and the ways we encourage others to think critically about the world. In vocational exploration, logos plays a distinctive role as the intellectual backbone that helps us discern our callings and align them with both reason and purpose.
Rhetorician Edwin Black offers a useful framework to understand how persuasive discourse creates identities and worldviews. In his 1970 landmark essay, “The Second Persona,” he argues that a rhetor’s discourse appeals to an ideal audience—one that embodies the values, beliefs, and habits conveyed through the discourse itself. For Black, logos’s appeal draws on more than the intrinsic logic of its arguments; it constructs a particular kind of reasoning that shapes how people think, act, and engage with the world.
Edwin Black, copyright University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.
As part of my dissertation research, I used Black’s second persona theory to analyze Joel Osteen’s discourse and examined hundreds of his sermons and books, interviews with him spanning decades, and his extensive social media presence. Through this lens, I identified the characteristics of the “ideal” audience Osteen envisions—individuals whose consciousness centers on wealth, health, and relationships. Osteen’s rhetoric constructs a worldview that prioritizes personal success in these areas while deliberately avoiding engagement with racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within higher education—a tension that both readers and writers of this blog care about in terms of its impact on vocation.
Reflecting on this analysis, I am struck by Black’s insight that the rhetorical dimensions of an argument can actually produce an audience—shaping not only identities but also actions. This principle resonates in the classroom, where the logos of my teaching inevitably influences the type of people my students become. The reasoning I present in my courses—whether through discussions of ethical communication or explorations of social justice—serves as a model for how students might engage with the world. In this way, appeals to logos help us do more than just craft compelling arguments; logos allows us to construct and use reasoning that aligns with communal values and inspires action.
For educators, the challenge lies in examining how our appeals to logos—and our systems and frameworks for reasoning—shape the way students think about vocation. Are we teaching them to prioritize personal gain, or are we guiding them to consider how their skills and knowledge can serve others? I often open class discussions by posing questions that encourage self-reflection: “What logic drives your decisions? Is it rooted in love, compassion, and justice, or does it reflect the values of a society that often prioritizes material success over the well-being of others?” These conversations help students explore the reasoning behind their aspirations and consider how their vocational goals align with a broader sense of purpose.
When I think about my role as an educator within the classroom, I consider how the logic I present shapes my students’ vocational journeys. In my public speaking course, for instance, I encourage students to think critically about the arguments they construct and the reasoning that drives their presentations. I ask them to engage with real-world issues, such as climate change or income inequality, and to develop speeches that not only inform but also propose actionable solutions. These assignments challenge students to connect the logic of their ethical reasoning to their emerging vocations, asking them, “What kind of impact do you want your words and actions to have on the world?”
In my public relations courses, I guide students through campaigns where logos becomes the foundation of their strategies. I often task them with designing a public awareness campaign for a nonprofit organization. This requires them to research the issue, analyze the needs of their audience, and craft a clear, compelling argument that inspires action. For example, one group designed a campaign for a local food bank, combining statistics about food insecurity with emotionally resonant stories from community members. This exercise teaches students that logos is not merely about data or facts, but involves constructing a coherent and ethical argument that responds to the world’s hunger and aligns with their values and contributes to the common good.
Students also benefit from exercises that explicitly connect logos to vocation. In one activity, I ask my students to write a “vocational argument,” where they articulate their career goals and the reasoning behind them. I require them to identify the values that underpin their aspirations and explain how their chosen path contributes to the common good. One student, for example, shared that her experiences volunteering at a domestic violence shelter inspired her to pursue a career in law. Her argument was grounded in a clear and logical connection between her empathy, values, and advocacy—her sense of justice—and her vocational goals. This kind of exercise not only sharpens students’ reasoning skills but also deepens their understanding of how logos can guide their decision-making.
As educators, we also have a responsibility to model logos in our own vocational practices. The logic of our teaching—that is, the arguments we make, the reasoning we employ, and the values we prioritize—shapes the kinds of vocations our students pursue. I often reflect on the metaphor of the shepherd, guiding those who follow. Just as a shepherd’s actions determine the path of the flock, our logos has a profound impact on the ethical and intellectual paths our students take. This awareness reminds me to approach my teaching with intentionality, ensuring that the reasoning I present is aligned with an ethos of love and transformation.
When combined with ethos, logos has the power to create a profound and lasting impact. While ethos represents the character and credibility of the speaker—what we might think of as vocational identity—logos provides the framework that allows us to articulate our values and translate them into action—or our vocational pursuits. Together, these appeals form the foundation of our vocational work, shaping not only what we teach but also how we teach it.
In my experience, fostering a strong sense of logos in the classroom means encouraging students to think critically about the reasoning that drives their decisions and to align that reasoning with their values. It also means providing opportunities for students to connect their logic to real-world applications, whether through speeches, campaigns, or reflective writing. By doing so, we equip them to navigate the complexities of the modern world with clarity, purpose, and integrity.
Ultimately, logos not only involves the arguments we make; it also represents values and assumptions that underpin those arguments and the kind of individuals they inspire. Our vocational journeys as educators require us to do more than transmit knowledge; we also shape the reasoning and values of those we teach. By aligning our logos with an ethos of love and justice, we can guide our students toward becoming thoughtful, ethical agents of positive change in a world that desperately needs them.
Reginald Bell, Jr., is an assistant professor of strategic communication and public relations at Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois. A third-generation clergyman, he was honored and humbled to deliver a TED Talk at Knox College in March 2024 titled “The Money is in the Hogs.” He first learned about NetVUE after attending seminars on vocation on his campus in 2024. For other posts by Reginald, click here.
