Tag: achievement

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. 

Continue reading “Connecting Calling to the Dignity of Labor”

Exploring Vocation in Honors Education

It’s fair to say that most faculty are honors students. We climbed the hill of academic success, garnered several complicated degrees and certificates, sat through terrifying and difficult exams, and embarked on various research projects.

Our identities as scholars and teachers are often still conflicted, responding to the demands of a product oriented higher education landscape and the liberal arts education many of us cherish. So, too, do our students who seek academic achievement find themselves conflicted when they arrive in an honors program.

Honors programs vary in nature and scope—some emphasizing an enriched liberal arts curriculum, some prizing individual research projects and some asking students to apply research in their communities and through civic engagement. The programs attempt to add depth or breadth to student experience, as well as platforms for innovative teaching and learning. Continue reading “Exploring Vocation in Honors Education”