This post presents an imagined dialogue between Sarah and her mentor Joel, exploring the conflict between support of authentic vocational exploration for students and the pursuit of an idealized programmatic outcome. They discuss the dangers of constraining students with pre-imagined paths, emphasizing the need for individual differences and a more flexible approach to discernment.
This post is framed as an imagined dialogue between two friends: Joel is a mentor to the narrator, Sarah. In what follows, Sarah narrates a conversation between the the two of them about an ongoing tension between authentically helping students with vocational discernment and aiming at the ideal and pre-imagined results of programmatic “purity.”
My friend Joel sat at a coffeehouse table in the sun with a small stack of art books and his notebook. When I arrived, he welcomed me, no matter that I was a little late for our appointment yet again. He and I have been meeting frequently since right after I arrived on campus in my new role as lead vocational counselor.
The last time we met, Joel had made a cautionary remark about purity that I wanted to follow up on. When I sat down, he smiled broadly and began chatting about spring flowers, as the two of us share a keen interest in plants and gardening. On this day, he had been reading and writing about the American painter, Philip Guston; Joel’s writing about his reading seems to be an admirable life habit.
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