Tag: assignments

Exploring Vocation Beyond Career: A Guide for Students in the Sciences

The post reflects on mentoring a student who struggled after not being accepted into graduate school, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing vocation from career in the sciences. A four-part vocational discernment assignment encourages students to explore their callings beyond professional paths, fostering self-awareness and engagement with their values and community roles.

A series exploring the teaching of vocation in physics.

young man sitting on table throwing papers
Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com

A few years ago, I mentored a student in their senior year who, despite their best efforts, did not get accepted into graduate school. The student was crushed. They had identified the path of graduate studies as their calling. Now, with the gate to that path closed for at least a year, what was their calling? For students in the sciences, their vocation and even their value are often tied up in their career. As a practice, science is all-consuming. It has a way of eating up your time, energy, goals, and personal life. You feel that if you are not “all in,” then you are doing it wrong.

Reflecting on this student’s experience, I realized that I could have done more to help them see how their calling or vocation could play out in multiple aspects of their life, which is why I now have students think and write more fully about this part of their vocation exploration. In this post, I highlight the impact of my four-part vocational discernment assignment for science students, which I described in my previous post. I also discuss a follow-up assignment, which instructors can use to help students think about vocation as something that intersects with multiple aspects of their lives, not just their future career.

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Vocation and Life Studies

The final post in this series discusses how creative writing pedagogy can benefit vocational education. It emphasizes the importance of life stories in addressing students’ identity crises and fears about the future. By studying the lives of various figures, students can gain insights into their own unpredictable journeys, learning that success often comes from embracing unexpected paths and overcoming failures.

The final post in a series on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.

Teaching and advising creative writing students can mean dealing with frequent identity crises. “But how do I become a real writer?” my students often ask. “How do I get published?” they want to know, or, “How can I pay my rent while pursuing my art?” Instructors of other disciplines may be able to relate, with students doubting their abilities to become a skilled enough doctor, lawyer, or engineer. “Do I really have what it takes to go to med school?” they might ask, or, “How do I choose between my passions and a job that pays the bills?”

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Vocation, Lineage, and Legacy

Creative writing pedagogy can enhance vocational teaching across disciplines by encouraging students to construct literary “family trees,” tracing their artistic influences. This exercise fosters a sense of belonging and legacy, linking students to historical figures in their fields. It empowers them to explore their roots, celebrate their influences, and envision their future contributions.

A series of posts on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.

Kalpis painting of Sappho by the Sappho Painter (c. 510 BC).

One of the most revealing exercises that teachers regularly assign in the creative writing classroom is the construction of a literary “family tree”—a map of a student writer’s artistic influences, those influences’ influences, and so on. In my creative writing MFA program, I had to construct a family tree of 20 poets who had shaped my own writing style, starting with 20th-century poet Adrienne Rich and stretching back from her to Emily Dickinson in the 19th century, on to Shakespeare, and all the way back to Sappho, who wrote 2,500 years ago. I then read and took an exam on all these figures’ writing. The exam resembled comprehensive exams in a PhD program, but with the explicit framework of my own personal artistic lineage and legacy.

In this post, I offer the “family tree” as a tool to be used by instructors in any discipline to help students on their vocational journeys. 

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Applying the Scientific Method to Vocational Discernment

The article outlines a four-part vocational exploration assignment designed for science students to help them engage with and refine their career aspirations. It emphasizes self-reflection, hypothesis formation, real-world testing, and final conclusions. The objective is to align students’ career choices with their strengths and values to foster their vocational growth.

A series exploring the teaching of vocation in physics.

the large hadron collider at geneva switzerland
Photo by Ramaz Bluashvili on Pexels.com

Over the course of my career, I have found that my students often do not realize that the type of science they might wish to pursue can constrain their future paths. Students who might want to work at a particle accelerator might not realize they cannot do so here in Washington State where I teach. This limitation often surprises them, especially those local students who want to remain close to home after they graduate. A highly scaffolded vocational exploration assignment can address this confusion.

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Visualizations in Vocational Exploration

You, too, can incorporate visualizations—word clouds, concept maps, 2×2 matrices, diagrams, charts, and dashboards—into your teaching to enhance your students’ vocational exploration. I detail a few visual-based exercises below along with short instructions, examples, and possible variations to get the ideas flowing.

Do most of the vocation-focused assignments or activities that you do with students revolve around the written or spoken word? That’s exactly what I found when I was invited to team-teach the second iteration of a vocational exploration seminar for 70 first-year honors students. We had a great syllabus of readings, reflection papers, lectures, and small-group discussion questions, but, as a design professor, I was having difficulty delivering in one mode. Students were also struggling to stay engaged with little variety in our format.

I began looking for ways to include visual-based exercises. Each week, my colleague and I would look over the materials to determine one that we would shift into a visualization. We started small by adding visual components to worksheets: meters and scales for students to fill in as supplement to their written answers. To enhance small-group discussions, we invited groups to create collective Venn diagrams and affinity diagrams in response to questions.

Portion of a “To whom shall I listen?” worksheet featuring a volume bar for students to fill in to the appropriate level.
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Character and calling in a time of crisis

No doubt you have seen the advice, attributed to Mister Rogers’ mother, that we should look to the helpers in those times when the news is scary. As the frightening realities about the spread of the Covid-19 virus have unfolded over the last few weeks, there are also plenty of stories of heroes and heroines on the national and local level. Paying attention to their stories and especially to the virtues that they embody in this harrowing situation can be an opportunity for students to consider how the virtues intersect with calling. Here, I’ll mention two examples, but there are many others now just as there will be in the weeks and months ahead.

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Pomp & Circumstance

Screen Shot 2018-05-25 at 10.29.22 AM
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/graduation-speech-for-college-graduates

May is the season for commencement addresses, a genre of writing often marked by platitudes and clichés, personal anecdotes that are of questionable relevance, and hyperbole about the significance of this historical moment or the potential of this year’s graduating class. As people tied to the rhythms and rituals of the academic year, over the span of a career we are exposed to dozens of such speeches. Since most graduation speeches are utterly forgettable, it’s difficult not to become somewhat cynical about them. And yet, they often touch upon important messages about vocation, and so it’s worthwhile to stop and think about the genre and function of the graduation speech. Continue reading “Pomp & Circumstance”