Tag: faculty development

The NetVUE Big Read: Exploring Diverse Perspectives and Vocational Reflection

On January 28, NetVUE hosted its first webinar of the year, discussing Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore’s book, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling. Faculty members shared diverse experiences relating to the book’s themes of callings that encompass joys and challenges. The session included discussion, audience engagement, and resource sharing, with a recording available online.

Webinar presenters and host: (top row, left to right) C. Douglas Johnson and Esteban Loustaunau; (bottom row, left to right): Tara Brooke Watkins and Rachel Pickett.

On January 28, NetVUE hosted its first webinar of the calendar year, which explored this year’s Big Read—Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling—from diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Three faculty members from NetVUE institutions reflected on the book’s major themes, including the reality that responding to our callings often requires us to wrestle with both the joys and the hardships that we face in our many roles in life. The presenters shared some of their vocational experiences that resonated with Miller-McLemore’s framework, hoping to help webinar participants find their way into it even if their lived experiences differ from the author’s.

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The NetVUE Big Read: Exploring Our Callings to Higher Education

NetVUE’s first webinar of the academic year, held on September 16, featured Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore discussing her book, “Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling.” Participants explored the challenges of vocational discernment in higher education. Additional resources were shared for implementing vocational support on campuses through NetVUE’s Big Read program.

Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

When we explore and discern our vocations, we often wrestle with both the joys and hardships that we face in the many roles we play in life. NetVUE’s first webinar of this academic year explored this topic on September 16, and featured Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, the author of this year’s Big Read, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies About Calling. As she discussed her book, she used insights from it to help participants contextualize and understand the challenges that we all face as we live out our callings to work in higher education. The discussion also provided context for colleagues as they being to engage their campuses in the Big Read.

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Using NetVUE Conversation Cards on Calling, Career, and a Life Well-Lived

NetVUE’s conversation cards aid vocational exploration with three inquiry-focused decks: explore, engage, and envision. NetVUE’s February webinar showcased various applications of these cards for students and faculty by speakers from different institutions, emphasizing community building, faculty development, and cultural context in vocation exploration.

NetVUE’s conversation cards are one of the latest tools aimed at supporting our students’ vocational exploration and discernment. There will be three decks focused on distinct kinds of inquiry—Explore, Engage, and Envision—with the first two decks already available, and the third set to be released in March. In addition, a Spanish language deck that focuses on more culturally situated aspects of vocation is being developed. Each of the decks features questions for students at all levels of vocational inquiry, from first-year icebreakers to senior-year capstones.

NetVUE’s most recent webinar focused on various ways to use this resource with students, as well as with staff and faculty. On February 3, the webinar’s featured speakers discussed their experiences with and strategies for making the most out of the first deck (Explore) to enhance vocation programming on their campuses.

Webinar speakers MT Dávila (top left), Jennifer Ferguson (top right), Monique Jiménez-Herrera (bottom left), and Peter Carlson Schattauer (bottom right).
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Tom Landy on the Importance of Wonder

In a new episode on the NetVUE podcast series, Callings: Conversations on College, Career, and a Life Well-Lived, sociologist of religion Tom Landy talks about his life’s work in helping people understand the “thickness” of religious traditions (their own and others’). Tom is director of the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His primary research is in global catholicism, and he founded and leads research for Catholics & Cultures, a web-based initiative to explore the religious lives and practices of lay Catholics in their particular cultural contexts around the world. He is also the founder of Collegium, a summer colloquy on faith and intellectual life for faculty from Catholic universities and colleges from around the country.

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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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Self-Care Workshop: Intentional Care for the Caregivers

How do we take the concept of care beyond the superficial aspect of “self-help” genres? How do we move self-care to deep care and sustain that care in our vocations and in our lives? Do we have the audacity to add care to our professional development and to our classrooms? With funding from NetVUE and guided by these questions, Wofford College hosted workshops for instructors who teach students in their first semester at the college.

In this final blog post on care in the academy, I want to highlight Wofford College’s self-care pedagogy workshops for instructors who teach incoming students in their first semester at the college. 

This work, funded by our 2020 NetVUE Program Development Grant (entitled Self Care Pedagogy for First-Year Students), supports sustainable practices for both students and instructors. Instructors applied to participate in our workshop. The opportunity to create and implement professional development began with a vision and these guiding questions:

  • How do we take the concept of care beyond the superficial aspect of “self-help” genres? 
  • How do we move self-care to deep care and sustain that care in our vocations and in our lives? 
  • Do we have the audacity to add care to our professional development and to our classrooms?  
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A Moment of Grief and Gratitude

Doug Schuurman’s vision of vocation is particularly timely for me in its “reevaluation of [the] mundane.” As someone who has spent the past four months trying to simultaneously change diapers AND work for an employer, his reminder of this deeper meaning was such a gift.

A reflection on the legacy of Doug Schuurman

An image of the Wind Chime Memorial Tower at St. Olaf College.

Do you know the kind of person who has a calming presence—they may not talk much, but their simply being in the room has a quiet effect on people, making them feel more comfortable in the group, curious about the people around them, eager to see the best in each other, willing to be vulnerable?  

One of the delights of returning a few years ago to my alma mater, St. Olaf College, has been reconnecting with my faculty members. The ones who inspired me as a student still inspire me as a colleague; the ones who intimidated me still intimidate me. But that quiet presence is something that holds me more in awe now than it did then. 

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