Tag: community-based learning

Self-Positioning as Vocational Exploration in Community-Engaged Learning

This post discusses how community-engaged learning (CEL) transforms students’ vocational exploration by emphasizing self-positioning and relational practices. It highlights the importance of understanding one’s identity and context, which fosters authentic connections and transforms perceptions. Through reflective exercises and community interaction, students gain insights into their roles and aspirations, leading to meaningful career paths.

A series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

Our students come to us and into our educational spaces—our classrooms, laboratories, studios, and offices—with different experiences, identities, interests, and talents. Recognizing this dynamic is central to our ability to harness the power of community-engaged learning (CEL) for vocational exploration. CEL is a pedagogical strategy that pairs meaningful and mutually beneficial work in communities with reflection. In our first post, we asserted that CEL helps students explore vocational paths by exposing them to new voices; it enables them to explore their interests and talents within this context and offers them a pedagogy of hope. 

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In this post, we explore vocational practices that elevate student learning within CEL and prepare students to build positive relationships with community partners and fellow learners. We focus on moments in which vocational exploration can strengthen CEL by equipping students to understand their own identities, assumptions, and knowledge about a community. When we integrate opportunities for individual self-positioning, good neighbor practices, and contextual preparation into our CEL courses, students are better equipped to explore their callings in community with others.

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Fostering Belonging through Community-Driven Theatre

The article explores the importance of theatre in fostering community, belonging, and vocational exploration. It advocates for theatre programs to focus on community needs through productions and projects that engage local issues. This approach not only enhances belonging among students but underscores theatre’s role as a vital community resource.

A series on the role of theatre in vocation, with a focus on how it supports community-building, the uncommon good, and vocational exploration and discernment for all our students.

Lights up on STUDENT after campus workshop using theatre to address a community need.

audience member attentively watching a presentation
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STUDENT

I didn’t know I could do this with theatre.

Enter AUDIENCE MEMBER who just saw a production created from the workshop.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I don’t see a lot of theatre, but the topic brought me here. . . I learned stuff I had no idea about and I’m now asking what can I do.

Lights fade.

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Unlocking Vocation through Community-Engaged Learning

The post introduces community-engaged learning (CEL) as a powerful method for vocational exploration, emphasizing its role in developing students’ social responsibility and career readiness. By facilitating meaningful interactions with community partners, CEL encourages students to discover their talents, question personal priorities, and engage in reflective practices to deepen their understanding of vocation.

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

As a high-impact practice, community-engaged learning (CEL) has long been valued for fostering students’ social and personal responsibility, improving their learning and career readiness, and increasing student retention. We argue that CEL has another, rarely examined power: it is a powerful avenue for exploring vocation. In a 2025 webinar, Rachael Baker describes vocation as a capacious concept that stretches into all aspects of our lives, is open to all people, and summons us to consider the flourishing of individuals and communities. CEL nudges students to move beyond their narrow interests to examine their vocation or purpose; the latter is defined by Bill Damon as “a long-term, active commitment to accomplish something that is both meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self.”

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