Many students encounter barriers in higher education due to systemic barriers rather than personal inadequacies. Faculty and staff are urged to redesign courses and support systems to foster student readiness. Collaborative efforts between institutions and communities are essential for enabling student success and creating transformative educational environments that honor all learners’ vocational journeys.
Every year, some students have their dreams derailed after they fail gateway courses or are unable to secure admission into selective undergraduate or graduate programs. We—as faculty, staff, and administrators—sometimes assume the barrier is students’ ability and ask if they are college-ready. Tia Brown McNair and her colleagues remind us to flip the question and ask if the systems we created are student-ready. What if collectively, we are the problem?
The post reflects on the importance of reimagining general education as a way to foster vocational discernment in an increasingly job-focused educational environment, advocating for its transformative potential throughout students’ academic journeys. The author shares insights into a new first-year seminar that connects a more common focus on vocational exploration to more specialized content.
For almost two decades, I taught a course called Created and Called for Community (CCC for short), a common learning course at Messiah University designed for first-year students to explore identity, community, and calling. Despite my ardent enthusiasm for it, I entered my first day of class each spring with trepidation as I anticipated student resistance. “Why do I have to take this course?” they often asked, expressing anything from curiosity to confusion to adamant frustration—as in, “I should not have to take this course.”
On many levels, I understood their resistance. Students experience ever increasing pressure from all directions—parents, peers, and culture—to focus their educational energies narrowly on preparation for lucrative employment. “Return on investment” is such a dominant evaluative frame for a college education’s value that general education courses are often considered something to “get out of the way,” something in which students see no reason to invest their intellectual or financial resources.
For the students who lack knowledge about vocational opportunities in the health professions, our focus should be on increasing awareness and exploration. For the students who lack the educational foundation, knowledge or skills to succeed, our approach should be different.
A series of posts about a collaborative project at the University of Dayton to develop courses, programs, and opportunities for undergraduate vocational discernment in the health professions, including a first-year course, “Discover Health and Medicine.”
“I’ve always wanted to help people” or “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor” are common student responses when I ask them why they are interested in pursuing a career in the health professions. This is true particularly among those students who were not initially accepted into a health professions major or who are struggling in classes and second-guessing themselves. Each time I hear one of these statements, it takes me back to my own experience as a teenager and as a first-year college student. I, too, was that student who decided at age twelve that I wanted to be a doctor. I was that student who excelled in science classes in high school but for whom first-year chemistry and biology were unexpected, anxiety-provoking struggles.
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.
Each course within the Bluffton Blueprint has a focusing question, as we seek to engage students, whatever their faith background, with foundational questions: Who am I? Who am I in community? Who am I in the world? and What then shall we do?
Many small, faith-based colleges have long embraced the centrality of their students’ vocational discernment but sometimes find it difficult to help prospective students connect with these significant goals. This challenge rings true for us at Bluffton University, a Mennonite-affiliated liberal arts college in northwest Ohio. Students often have important questions about their life’s direction, but they have been conditioned to have a clear, simple answer to the “what is your major” question.
To create space for students to reflect together on key vocational questions, we have developed the Bluffton Blueprint, a four-year sequence of courses taken by all students. We have made the Bluffton Blueprint a central part of our message to prospective students. The Blueprint allows us to engage students, most of whom know little about Mennonites, with vocational ideas from an Anabaptist perspective that resonate with a wide audience. As our vice president of enrollment and advancement described in a recent Inside Higher Ed article, we believe that foregrounding these key questions of meaning and purpose has resonated with prospective students.
I wonder how many voices I miss every single day. How many voices we miss–intentionally or otherwise–because we have been socialized not to attend to them… We do not even know who or what we’re not hearing.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the voices I hear. Or perhaps more accurately I’ve been thinking of the voices I don’t hear and that we collectively don’t hear.
Given the cost of higher education, it is not surprising that parents and many students see college’s purpose as providing students with the skills to make a good living. Colleges, especially colleges in NetVUE, see their vocation in wider terms: to allow students to reach their full potential, intellectually and personally, to become good citizens, to find a meaningful path in life. I have long argued that given our globally interconnected world and pluralistic country, it is part of our vocation as educational institutions to give students the knowledge and experiences that would allow them to understand and navigate that world. The way difference is now being used to divide, this has only gotten more important.
