vocation matters

Valleys and Hollers: Vocation in Rural Settings

Being rural has implications for higher education, ranging from policy creation to fascinating ideas like placemaking and boundary spanning. It also affects how we think about vocation.

Some might associate the word “rural” with “the boonies” or the “middle of nowhere.” If you have Appalachian roots like me, the idea of the “holler” might come to mind. Whether you’re a “flatlander” or nestled in a cascade of valleys, the word “rural” might conjure images of rolling farmland or long stretches of road across the horizon. Being rural has implications for higher education, ranging from policy creation to fascinating ideas like placemaking and boundary spanning. It also affects how we think about vocation.

A Blessing and a Limp

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings features a conversation with Marjorie Hass who became the president of the Council of Independent Colleges last July. In her responses to our questions about calling, leadership, and times of personal as well as institutional crisis, she drew upon a set of images and metaphors from her own Jewish tradition. For her, calling is first and foremost about responsibility—that is, our ability to respond—as Abraham and others did.

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast series Callings features a conversation with Marjorie Hass who became the president of the Council of Independent Colleges last July. Dr. Hass previously served as president of Rhodes College and of Austin College. In her responses to our questions about calling, leadership, and times of personal as well as institutional crisis, she drew upon a set of images and metaphors from her own Jewish tradition. For her, calling is first and foremost about responsibility—that is, our ability to respond—as Abraham and others did.

Our Entangled Banks

What if we took Darwin’s vision of our participation within a community of creation seriously and contemplated Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom for addressing challenges facing higher education? This post begins a series that will describe the co-creation of a high-impact general education class for first year students developed at Wingate University called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of our Lives.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at Wingate University, resulting in a first-year course called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of Our Lives.

*Mr. Darwin’s Lovely Thought*
*– detail 1*; *susanskuseart.com*

Elizabeth Johnson’s Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (2015) offers much to those looking to explore vocation in a COVID world. For Johnson, the human vocation is to praise the Creator and care for the natural world rather than destroy it. She suggests that in the process of falling in love with the Creator via caring for creation, human beings will find our true identities reimagined as “vital members of the community of creation rather than as a species divorced from the rest.” The entangled bank, an overlooked metaphor offered by Darwin, could be our guide:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

What if we took this vision of our participation within a community of creation seriously and contemplated Earth’s entangled banks as a source of wisdom for addressing challenges facing higher education? This post begins a series that will describe the co-creation of a high-impact general education class for first year students developed at Wingate University called Food and Faith: Health and Happiness Around the Many Tables of our Lives.

Thomas Aquinas Walks into a Bar: Vocation and (the Virtue of) Humor

Living out any calling in the midst of community requires a sense of humor. Laughter, after all, is about relationship: the corniest joke will succeed, and the cleverest fail, depending on how well the teller reads their audience. Laughter can invite people into shared community, and it can shut people out.

For teachers, then, laughter can be a gift, but it’s never without risk. So it’s good for us to think about how humor might shape our approach to our teaching, our students, and the way we see vocation. After all, Jason D. Stevens is right when he writes, “College, career, and calling are too often matters of pressure and panic. Laughter is something the world, and our students, could use more of. And so, perhaps, could vocational studies.”

Vocation revisited, part 1

Is “vocation” really a helpful word for the work we do with students? A conversation about vocation, race, class, privilege, and interfaith engagement, facilitated by Anita Houck.

Over the years, Vocation Matters bloggers have often asked, “Is ‘vocation’ really a helpful word for the work we do with students?”

I’ve had the opportunity to work with wonderful colleagues who are powerful, generous mentors to our students, but who have had their own concerns about the word “vocation.” So I greatly appreciated the opportunity to talk about “the ‘v’ word” with Professor Stacy Davis, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and Gender and Women’s Studies. I then brought Dr. Davis’s written thoughts to a Zoom conversation with two exceptional alumnae of Saint Mary’s, Romona Bethany, Group Violence Intervention Program Manager for The City of South Bend, and Sophia Funari, currently a student in the M.Div. program at the University of Notre Dame. I interwove the comments and invited these three wise women to edit their comments as they wished. My deepest gratitude to them for the privilege of learning from them.

Anita: Dr. Davis, you’ve raised questions about whether “vocation” is always a helpful term to use. What limitations do you see in the word, especially when we’re working with students?

Stacy: I have two main concerns with the language of vocation. The first involves the idea of vocation as a type of singular and permanent state, which I think can create an unnecessary sense of panic in emerging adults. David Cunningham notes that vocation needs to be a more flexible concept to acknowledge that paths change over time, and that vocation has often been limited incorrectly to one’s profession [see his introduction to Vocation Across the Academy]. But I am not sure the language of vocation is flexible enough for that.

Mentoring for the Cultivation of Virtue in the Sciences

Through the intentional and explicit inclusion of Christian Practices in a research experience, we hope to help students better understand that living vocationally transcends the work we do and encompasses discerning and prioritizing who we want to be as individuals and community members in work (and other) environments.

Part of a series of posts written by a team of faculty and students at Calvin University who are developing a curriculum to support team-based research. Their hope is that this blog series will spark a dialog about measures of success that are not typically prioritized in scholarly work and ways this project could be expanded to other colleges and universities, both within and beyond the Christian tradition. This post was written by Rachael Baker, Julie Yonker, and Amy Wilstermann.

In the first three blogs in this series, we introduced our Team Sciences and Christian Practices project—an initiative aimed at preparing undergraduate scientists-in-training to work effectively in interdisciplinary environments through the development of faith-based virtue practices. Many students in the sciences have a narrow view of vocation that overemphasizes the value and importance of their paid work and their productivity in those spaces. Through the intentional and explicit inclusion of Christian Practices in a research experience, we hope to help students better understand that living vocationally transcends the work we do and encompasses discerning and prioritizing who we want to be as individuals and community members in work (and other) environments. Our curriculum aims to encourage students to think more deeply about what it means to engage fully in community and to equip them to do so in current and future research settings, classrooms, their local community, and beyond. In this last post we describe how we prepare faculty to discuss, model, and encourage employment of faith-based virtue practices in their undergraduate research settings and how we are assessing the impact of our curriculum.

The Vocation of Science

When we model explicitly how our vocational framework shapes the questions we ask about our career and work, we open the door for students to do the same, both in their current setting and in future settings as well.

In the previous two blog posts, we discussed the framework and some key examples of the curriculum we are developing in (Christian) practices for success in Team Science. In this post, we will discuss how a NetVUE faculty development grant led to a vision for understanding the vocation of science differently and how making that vision explicit is important for engaging students in their own vocational exploration.

Faculty are expected to engage in vocational exploration with students. Sometimes vocational engagement is explicitly addressed through a class discussion, sometimes through an internship or research experience, and sometimes more informally through an advising or mentoring relationship. To teach, mentor and advise students, faculty members need to be theologically literate in the tradition of the institution and grasp how those theological commitments bear on disciplinary issues and questions of vocation. The vocation of the professor is intertwined with navigating callings in themselves and mentoring callings in their students. This multi-faceted approach to faculty vocation requires accurate self-understanding and awareness of the perspective of students.

The “Freshman Comp” Course: Speaking the Truth in Love

We must help students see that to be effective in the conversations to which we are called, we must, ultimately, become certain kinds of people: humble, charitable, hospitable, patient, reasonable.

I’m starting to think the first-year writing course might be the most important class in the world, or, rather, to the world, at this cultural moment.

It’s been a year of abysmal and broken public discourse. Add a pandemic, social injustice, increasingly shrill and reductive social media discourse, partisanship, the hijacking of minds and attention spans by technology, the endless stream of voices seducing us into lives of self-absorbed consumerism, language decay that leaves students increasingly unable to articulate their views and experiences, and I think “freshman” rhetoric deserves serious consideration for this outrageous award. It seems more urgent than ever to protect and nurture students’ abilities to think, discuss, debate, speak truth, hear truth, and disagree well. I think we are being called by our world, our culture, and our students to reimagine and redesign the nature and experience of first-year writing.

The ability to recognize, analyze, formulate, and articulate a persuasive argument supported by good evidence is the heart of an academic. For millennia rhetoric has been thought vital to democratic politics, civic engagement, and education.

But we need more. We need to help first-year students come to see and experience conversation and argumentation as a calling.

Advising is Teaching, and Other Truisms

In a recent piece on the AAC&U blog, Isabel Roche gently admonished liberal arts colleges and their faculty for not making good on the promise of an integrated student experience.

Holistic mentoring—the kind of mentoring that ideally involves supporting students in the discernment of their vocations—is sometimes framed as a return to an older model of advising, one that was traditionally under the purview of faculty. Simply put, to borrow the subtitle from William James’ Pragmatism, holistic mentoring is “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.” Yet just as often it is celebrated as something new and distinctive, a welcome development over previous modes of advising that were prescriptive and often perfunctory.

Considered historically, the shifts in advising involved a related shift in personnel, that is, who is doing the advising and for what purpose. In many contexts, faculty have ceded advising to student affairs personnel and others. Advising occurs in various silos across campus, sometimes to the detriment of students. And, as Isabel Roche pointed out recently on the AAC&U Liberal Education blog, this leaves unfulfilled one of the important promises of the liberal arts college (See “Advising is Teaching. Now Is the Time to Make Good on its Promise”).

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Valleys and Hollers: Vocation in Rural Settings

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A Blessing and a Limp

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Thomas Aquinas Walks into a Bar: Vocation and (the Virtue of) Humor

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Mentoring for the Cultivation of Virtue in the Sciences

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The Vocation of Science

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The “Freshman Comp” Course: Speaking the Truth in Love

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Advising is Teaching, and Other Truisms

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