Learning and Living Through Awe

Photo by the author

In his recent article in Christian Scholar’s Review, Paul Waddell suggests that every human being is called to live wisely and well. In practical terms, responding to this shared calling means becoming “skillfully attuned, each day, to the myriad ways in which we are summoned out of ourselves in response to the beauty, loveliness, and goodness of the created order—as well as in response to its suffering and affliction.” To me, this sounds at once true, simple, and utterly countercultural, as perhaps simple and true things often are.  

Waddell’s account of growth in wisdom certainly runs counter to what many people these days expect a college education to accomplish. Professors and university administrators are asked by pundits, legislators, parents, and prospective students about placement rates, career-readiness, and trending programs, but not very often about what it means to live well. I personally can’t recall any conversations in which outsiders to the university have asked me if we give students the capacity to be skillfully attuned to beauty and suffering. And the truth is that in an atmosphere of precarity, many of us might prefer simply to focus on “giving them what they want,” which seems to be a clear and comfortable path to a lucrative credential.

Except that we do still talk about learning, and I want to propose that the necessary connection between learning and awe is the reason that college still can and should produce the kind of attunement to calling that Waddell talks about. In fact, if we do learning right, it must at least potentially give students the capacity for living wisely and well.

Continue reading

Called to Endings

During my graduate coursework in the late 1990s, Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction was revelatory for me. Published in 1966, it certainly wasn’t part of any hot, new direction in Victorian studies; it couldn’t even be described as canonical at the time. But it was vital for my own scholarly trajectory in its examination of our need for endings and how narratives play with temporality and shape our experiences both of reading and of living.

I’ve been thinking about endings a lot over the past year, prompted no doubt by the death of a parent and by my choosing to give up one of my administrative appointments, but also by our new realities in the post-pandemic academy. Perhaps it seems odd to consider endings just as we approach or anticipate the start of the new academic year—new classes, new students, new colleagues. But endings are bound up in beginnings, and to recognize their importance in our interpretive work brings vocational clarity. To begin anything is, paradoxically, to begin its ending.

Continue reading

The Carnegie Hour and the Vocation of Student Learning

In my previous post, I reflected on the impossibility of today’s full-time, undergraduate students’ completing the two “independent student learning” homework hours for every “instructor-led” class hour as standardized by Carnegie. Fulfilling these mandated homework hours was not possible before the pandemic because students did not have enough time in their weekly schedules. After the pandemic, students face even more obstacles. Still lacking enough time to study, students seem to be missing critical independent study skills and are experiencing limited cognitive capacity as well as increased mental health concerns. In this post, I will offer a few concrete ways to address these two concerns in our syllabi and support the vocation of student learning.

Continue reading

Special Issue on Vocation: Christian Scholar’s Review

The Summer 2023 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review is devoted to the subject of vocation in undergraduate education. Guest edited by David S. Cunningham, executive director of NetVUE, this special issue features articles by a range of writers who have been active in the network, both on their own campuses and more broadly through their writing and speaking: Bryan Dik, Niki Johnson, Tom Perrin, Amy Santas, Paul Wadell, and Danny Wasserman. It also contains reviews of recent vocation-related books, including several whose authors have been featured at NetVUE events: Kiara Jorgenson, Jason Mahn, Patrick Reyes, and Charlie Pinches and Paul Wadell.

Continue reading

How Much Does Loyalty Weigh?

This post will try to explain a way of thinking about our vocational interactions in which loyalty might weigh more than intelligence.

Before the technologies of notes apps and simple word processing software were created, I collected and saved memorable quotations on notecards, using a typewriter. Then I’d file the typed and titled cards alphabetically in an old, wooden, recipe card box. In that box, in the Ls, is a card titled LOYALTY. The card contains a quotation from San Martin, “The Liberator,” whose idea about loyalty was found repurposed on a factory wall in Argentina in the 1980s. The quotation ended with “Remember: an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of intelligence.”

I can’t remember where I came across the quotation or in what context it was used, but I’m pretty sure I made the effort to capture the thought because I was intrigued by its comparative equivalency in favor of an unthinking loyalty. At the time, and until recently, I was suspicious of loyalty, especially as a tool used to manipulate people to act without thinking.

Continue reading

Responding to AI with a Resonant Education

When I became the inaugural director of St. Lawrence University’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Assessment in the fall of 2022, I was worried about student engagement and mental health coming out of the Covid pandemic. As that academic year ended, however, I was also alarmed at the ways increasing social media usage coupled with widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT present us with existential challenges that feel insurmountable.

I am not alone. The Surgeon General released a report noting the ways social media use can “pose a risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” And you cannot do any type of faculty development in 2023 without someone raising the question of AI and the future of teaching and learning.

As we approach the fall semester, I offer the concept of resonancedrawn from the work of sociologist Harmut Rosa—to think about how to address what I see as the interconnected dilemmas of the ongoing student mental health crisis and the rise of AI, especially ChatGPT.

Continue reading

Gifted!: Repaying Education With Good Work and Care

When my oldest son was in elementary school, he would quite innocently announce that he was in the “gifted and talented” program at his school. His mom and I would wince. Would others take his proclamation to be the self-deserving swagger of a 10-year-old white kid? He is now on the college admissions circuit. Have we parents, teachers, coaches, and pastors enabled him to see and resist wielding his white, male privilege? And, if so, could he nonetheless hold onto his 10-year-old self-understanding that he (and you and I) are, indeed, gifted and talented—quite literally the recipients of gifts and the stewards of talents that we did not earn but that we are called to develop and use for the flourishing of whole communities?

My recent posts have circled around this notion of giftedness and being gifted. I’ve suggested that the circulation of gifts is a more helpful way to describe being educated for vocation than what often passes for purpose and meaning within higher education. This is largely because education, in both private and public settings, has been made into an investment seeking return and a product to be purchased. To consider education as gift, above and beyond what one might pay for it, changes the way that we reflect on and carry out the work for which education prepares us. I want to bring some of these musing together here and consider how understanding students as gifted and education as a gift economy can lead to restorative and regenerative work. 

Continue reading

Richard Sévère on Sharing Stories

The hosts of NetVUE’s Callings podcast, Erin VanLaningham and John Barton, sit down for a conversation with Richard Sévère in the latest episode. Richard is professor of English and interim associate dean at Valparaiso University, where he also directs the Bloom Scholars Program, a program that prepares students academically, socially, and culturally for college, especially first-generation and underprepared students. In this episode, Richard shares how purposefully connecting with colleagues and students to hear their stories can allow a sense of difference to inform vocational discernment.

Continue reading

Genuine Callings Support Each Other

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first edition

Victor Frankenstein is the most irritating protagonist I’ve ever met. Yet I love teaching Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and exploring the questions it raises, questions not only of what Victor creates but the process by which he creates it. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is no doctor, but a college student who deals with a predictable college student issue: keeping in touch with home. As he fails to visit or even write to his family, he remembers his father’s words: “I know that while you are pleased with yourself, you will think of us with affection and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected.”

“Is his father right?” I ask my students. Is failing to write really a sign that he’s neglecting his other duties? His work is what’s keeping him from writing. Isn’t his research also a duty, deserving focus? Is it even possible to do his kind of work and do other things, like keeping up his family relationships, at the same time? 

Continue reading

Can the Carnegie Hour Support the Vocation of Student Learning?

The Carnegie hour is a unit of time that standardizes academic study across institutions. Established in 1906 as means to calculate retirement hours earned, Carnegie hours are now often required on syllabi. This way, students (and accreditation agencies) know how many “instructor-led” class hours to expect and how many “independent student learning” homework hours to schedule.

Educators have been critical of standardized measures of academic time since these hours were instituted. Even Carnegie has called for their revision. Others counter that they are so embedded in how higher education measures, well, everything—student learning, academic terms, job descriptions, full-time faculty employment (FTEs), TIAA retirement earnings, national accreditation assessments—that untangling higher education from this constructed 50-minute “hour” is practically impossible.

Continue reading