NetVUE’s February 2024 Webinar focused on vocational elements of education and personal development outside of typical educational settings.
Engaging students in the classroom continues to be an essential part of undergraduate education. But what if we took our work outside the typical classroom? To reach a those students who may not have easy access to education, we must become creative and meet them where they are. Opportunities to explore meaning and purpose should be accessible to all.
NetVUE’s February 2024 Webinar focused on vocational elements of education and personal development outside of typical educational settings. On February 7, three invited speakers discussed experiences of and strategies for taking vocation beyond the traditional campus in our work with students from diverse backgrounds.
Heather Brady (top left), Jason Mahn (top right) Jason Stevens (bottom left), Rachel Pickett (bottom right)
The hosts of NetVUE’s Callings podcast, Erin VanLaningham and John Barton, sit down for a conversation with Richard Sévère in the latest episode.
The hosts of NetVUE’s Callings podcast, Erin VanLaningham and John Barton, sit down for a conversation with Richard Sévère in the latest episode. Richard is professor of English and interim associate dean at Valparaiso University, where he also directs the Bloom Scholars Program, a program that prepares students academically, socially, and culturally for college, especially first-generation and underprepared students. In this episode, Richard shares how purposefully connecting with colleagues and students to hear their stories can allow a sense of difference to inform vocational discernment.
As part of its 2023 UnConference, NetVUE hosted a webinar on March 23 with three teams who discussed their experiences and strategies for actively integrating vocation into diverse populations so that both our students and our communities benefit.
As our society continues to become more diverse and connected to the global community, students need to consider their vocations in a sociocultural context. In addition to helping students discern their many callings in life, this work can make an important contribution to developing campuses and communities that are more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just. As part of its 2023 UnConference, NetVUE hosted a webinar on March 23 with three teams who discussed their experiences and strategies for actively integrating vocation into diverse populations so that both our students and our communities benefit.
From left to right: John DeCostanza, Sheila Bauer-Gatsos, Bradley Pardue, and Trishia Kholodenko.
If you work as I do in a college community, you know the challenges of helping students see the lungs in the life of learning. Think of the ribs as the deadlines on the syllabus, the grade point averages at midterms, the multiple-choice questions on the final exam. The lungs are all the things that make you want to study something in the first place, all the insights and frameworks that enable laughter in the classroom and the smart hubbub of collaborative conversation.
Craig Mattson has interviewed many young professionals about their work experiences and their lives following graduation. This post is part of a series about what he has learned and how it might inform our work with young adults about vocation.
In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi tells a story about his med-school days when he first tried to read an X-ray image.
At first, he says, he couldn’t see anything but the ribs. In desperation, he sidled up to some seasoned doctors and eavesdropped on their analysis. Oscillating between what they were saying and what they were seeing, Polanyi gradually stopped looking at the ribs and started seeing the lungs.
If you work as I do in a college community, you know the challenges of helping students see the lungs in the life of learning. Think of the ribs as the deadlines on the syllabus, the grade point averages at midterms, the multiple-choice questions on the final exam. The lungs are all the things that make you want to study something in the first place, all the insights and frameworks that enable laughter in the classroom and the smart hubbub of collaborative conversation.
Driven by a life-long calling to educational equity, Mary Dana Hinton became the 13th president of Hollins University in August 2020 after serving as president of the College of Saint Benedict for many years. In a new episode of the NetVUE podcast series, she shares that on some days her calling feels heavy. She goes on to describe how the inspiration of her hard-working mother, the encouragement from early mentors, and the uplifting teachings of the black church have kept her going over the years.
As a young girl in Kittrell, North Carolina, Mary Dana Hinton never imagined she might one day become the president of a college. Driven by a life-long calling to educational equity, she became the 13th president of Hollins University in August 2020 after serving as president of the College of Saint Benedict for many years. In a new episode of the NetVUE podcast series, Callings, she shares that on some days her calling feels heavy. She goes on to describe how the inspiration of her hard-working mother, the encouragement from early mentors, and the uplifting teachings of the black church have kept her going over the years.
This fall, NetVUE hosted a virtual roundtable discussion about the theme of vocation in the Netflix series, The Chair. Kirsten Oh, professor of practical theology at Azusa Pacific University, offered these comments about the main character’s Korean American identity and the experience of women of color in academia.
Old Main on the campus of Washington and Jefferson College, where much of The Chair was filmed. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This invitation gave me the opportunity to binge-watch the series again with an eye toward family systems and its influence on vocation as presented in The Chair’s main character, Professor Ji-Yoon Kim, played by Sandra Oh. (And to answer the question that may be on some minds, NO, unfortunately, we are not related).
My initial viewing of the first few minutes of The Chair sent me to a space of euphoria. With Vivaldi’s “Gloria in D-Major,”The Chair begins with a bravado that proclaims a sense of arrival. And to have a Korean-Canadian who happens to share the same last name as me play the leading role of an American female professor—I felt represented. This, of course, is a widely shared sentiment among many Asian American female professors. To have our identity, belonging, and purpose showcased on a public screen is at once a surprising and astounding experience. In her friend and the embroiled colleague Bill Dobson’s words, Professor Kim indeed “ascended the ranks of her profession, the corner office, the publications, and so on.”
Yet, soon after, Gloria fades and she attempts to sit on a broken desk chair. I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh no ($%&#),” this probably foreshadows that her stint as a chair will flop and will be short-lived. And spoiler alert, her role as chair belies the academic system some of us who straddle the intersectional identities as women and persons of color face, that is the glass ceiling at both the teaching and leadership positions in departments, and within the institutions as well. In reviewing the series with a vocational lens there are at least these two movements that “push and pull” the various vocational contexts.
To develop an authentic sense of self in a context that is increasingly characterized by diversity and confusion, we need to think about what voices we hear (and don’t) and to which we should listen (or not). As a nation and as individuals we are in deep need of dialogue across the differences that divide us.
Diversity is a fact of life. All societies are internally diverse, but some types of diversity provoke social anxiety. We are very comfortable with diversity in sports, fashion, cuisine, in fact such diversity is encouraged. But diversity that calls into question our assumptions and most cherished ideas about meaning in the world trigger deep-seated anxieties about the order of the cosmos. Challenges to our preconceived ideas of how the world is organized risk what Peter Berger called the “terror of anomy” (The Sacred Canopy, 26); they risk undermining our trust in meaning and order in the universe. Challenges to normative views on religions, politics, race, and gender, for example, create powerful anxiety. Such fears divide us. Talking about these differences requires courage and overcoming these fears requires we talk to people who are different.
To develop an authentic sense of self in a context that is increasingly characterized by diversity and confusion, we need to think about what voices we hear (and don’t) and to which we should listen (or not). As a nation and as individuals we are in deep need of dialogue across the differences that divide us. Drawing upon David Tracy’s description of “conversation,” I offer suggestions for dialogues about and across the differences that divide us constructive.
Understanding why we might experience suffering was less important than knowing someone cared enough to show up with a casserole. This is always true, but I suspect that in this time of social-distancing when we are often deprived of human contact and communal meals it is especially true. We collectively decided that a theodicy of casseroles makes more sense than any theological explanation of evil and suffering ever could. A theodicy of casseroles is not about explanation at all; it is about presence and community.
Suvi Korhonen, Creative Commons
This fall semester I am teaching a course on theology and suffering. The course is titled “Sin, Suffering, and the Silence of God.” It is a course I teach every few years, so it was on the schedule for this fall long before Covid-19 swept across the world. The students in this class are amazing–they always are. It is a seminar for upper-level Religious Studies majors and it is cross-listed for Counseling students. The students who take it want to be there; the class gives them a space to ask questions they want to wrestle with.
This year, as we have begun the fall semester in a hybrid format, meeting in small groups, once a week only, masked, and socially distanced, a course on suffering takes on a different level of meaning. We began the semester acknowledging our individual and collective losses. We have, in only a few short weeks, lamented and grieved together.
I enter the classroom as a sacred space, conscious of and delighting in the uniqueness of each student. My value for my students requires me to engage them respectfully, and to be attentive to their words, and to their silence. A vision of the sacred opens my heart to each student, and I am a better teacher for this fact.
Opening Convocation address delivered by Anantanand Rambachan at St. Olaf College in August, 2020.
As we begin a new academic year, I want to offer a vision, a way of seeing each other, in Sanskrit, a darshan. I do so with the hope that this vision offers us some truth, some light, in these times of daunting challenges, fear and despair. This vision comes from the heart of the Hindu tradition, the tradition that I came to St. Olaf College, almost 35 years ago, to share with my students and my colleagues. (The story of my journey from a small rural village in Trinidad to Saint Olaf is one for another occasion).
The regional NetVUE gathering in November in Nashville was titled “Institutions Can Have Vocations, Too.” Organized by Richard Hughes and held at Lipscomb University, it was well attended and prompted rich discussions, but three threads emerged as especially salient to me: the usefulness of story in thinking about institutional vocation; tensions between institutional identity and diversity; and the significance of explicit vs. implicit stories and the stories that we do not tell.
