Tag: assessment

Assessing Community-Engaged Learning to Deepen Vocational Reflection

The final post in this series discusses the impact of community-engaged learning on students’ vocational exploration. It emphasizes the importance of reflective practice in fostering deeper learning. By revising assessment strategies and prompts, the authors enhanced students’ understanding of teamwork and intercultural competency, leading to meaningful civic engagement and a greater sense of personal responsibility within their communities.

The final post in a series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

As educators, we want to know that our efforts impact our students, but assessment is difficult, especially when we seek to measure learning about vocation. It requires that we—alongside our students—engage in “continuous, connected, challenging and contextual” reflective practice, as recommended by one practitioner’s guide. Our last post illustrated how teamwork can be a kind of vocational praxis, offering students the opportunity to discover common ground in community with others. In our final post, we describe the outcomes of Heather and her colleague Erin Olsen-Telles’s learning, paying particular attention to the impact of embedding reflection in community-engaged learning on students’ vocational discoveries. By redesigning assessment strategies, we came to understand that reflection grounded in community contexts empowers students to engage in the deeper learning that opens the door to vocational discernment.

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Vocation and Lutheran Higher Education

The latest issue of Intersections, published by the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities (NECU), includes articles by colleagues at NetVUE schools about campus programs at their institutions. Entitled “Called and Empowered (and Assessed),” the Spring 2022 also includes a note from out-going editor (Jason Mahn, a contributor to this blog) and in-coming editor Colleen Windham-Hughes of California Lutheran University. As Jason states in his editor’s note, most of the essays summarize comments that were shared at the 2022 NetVUE Conference in Dallas this March, and/or at the NECU gathering that preceded the NetVUE Conference.

Contents of Spring 2022 Intersections.


Jason writes, “As the authors here testify, grants and guidance from NetVUE have been instrumental in supporting their work. At the same time, Lutheran institutions—with our uniquely historical and contemporary commitments to educate for vocation— have provided noteworthy leadership within these wider networks. I think that part of the work ahead of us is to own and live into that leadership role.” The issue can be downloaded here.