vocation matters

Re-visioning Humility as a Virtue for Vocation

The author reflects on a classroom experience where students struggled to identify their skills and talents. This silence prompted discussions about societal expectations and humility. The piece re-imagines the practice of the virtue of humility in relation to the barriers young women especially face in recognizing their giftedness due to cultural pressures. It ultimately emphasizes the importance of acknowledging both strengths and limitations in personal growth.

students cheating during an exam — *^{Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com}*

One day about halfway through the semester with a class of thoughtful, generous, and talkative juniors, we were turning our attention to the role of religious practices. I wanted to prime them to think about the way “practices” take “practice,” so I asked what I thought was a fairly innocuous question to generate discussion: What is something that you are good at, and how did you get good at it? I then circulated throughout the room, eager to eavesdrop on the small group conversations of these engaged and engaging young adults. Instead, I heard only a “profound and holy silence.” Anna, a brilliant and conscientious psychology major with a great sense of humor and a small group of deeply devoted friends, sat in silence with Jillian, a compassionate and skilled nursing student with a side job as the group fitness instructor whose class everyone rushes to sign up for. Finally, Anna stammered, “Well, I guess I used to be good at dancing, but I don’t have time for that anymore.”

Our Students’ Vocations and the Gift of (Un)Gendered Language

This post emphasizes the importance of gender justice in higher education, particularly in language and pronoun use. It discusses the need for inclusive teaching methods that recognize diverse gender identities, while also critiquing traditional practices that may marginalize LGBTQIA+ students, including the compulsory sharing of pronouns. The author advocates for fostering supportive environments that promote vocational exploration for all students.

hands joined against progress pride flag — *^{Photo by Lisett Kruusimäe on Pexels.com}*

Gender justice—both in and through language—is fundamental to my vocation. As an out queer faculty member, I center the power of language, narrative, and agency in my teaching and in my mentoring relationships. My courses span topics from French language to Francophone world cultures, and LGBTQIA+ literature to queer and feminist theories. Accordingly, gender and sexuality are embedded throughout them as forces that shape our day-to-day lives, the institutions we inhabit, and their linguistic norms. At the same time, my students and I grapple collectively with how we contribute to reinforcing or disrupting these concepts and how we might activate them to empower or to constrain.

Rethinking Vocation in Gender and Sexuality Studies

Both Gender and Sexuality Studies and vocational exploration invite students to rethink assumptions, to contribute to the world in which they want to live, and to be ready to redesign the shape that their engagement will take over a lifetime.

Major Decisions, Major Discoveries: Exploring Vocation in the Undergraduate Years, a series of posts from Nebraska Wesleyan University about helping students develop meaning and purpose as part of their major coursework

Vocation is a shared language for me and the students I teach, advise, and supervise. Not only are students still identifying their future careers but I, after 25 years as a professor in religious studies, am also still exploring my vocation by directing the Gender and Sexuality Studies program, which offers an interdisciplinary, advocacy major that draws on the humanities and the social sciences. This role illuminates for me that what we do as teachers, professors, advisors, and internship supervisors isn’t about sharing what we think we already know. In this program, the collaborative, high-impact practices do not include lecturing (see the AAC&U on high-impact practices). Instead, we engage students at the intersections of what we control and what we don’t, what we are good at and what we can do for others, and what can be planned for and what we encounter despite our planning—without perfectionism or self-deception. Both Gender and Sexuality Studies and vocational exploration invite students to rethink assumptions, to contribute to the world in which they want to live, and to be ready to redesign the shape that their engagement will take over a lifetime.

Mentoring in Community

There is value in the constancy of a single, life-long mentor, but what incredible ego to think that I—and I alone—can or should play such a singular role in any person’s life. There is another kind of value in a mentorship community made up of diverse voices, experiences, and perspectives—a community made up of people who come and go, who agree and disagree, who give different kinds of advice, who model different choices, and who collectively open up all kinds of ways to think, do, and live in the world.

Throughout my career as a university educator, I have mentored dozens of college students during a concentrated and intentional season of their vocational discernment, specifically young women interested in the vocational possibilities of literacy, storytelling, and advocacy. Many of these are students of literature, writing, and education, but they are also students of film, theology, social work, psychology, physical therapy, chemistry, and engineering. Sometimes we meet for an official meeting in my office, but more often mentorship looks like a quick hallway chat, a wave across the library, a text message update, a walk around campus, catching up over coffee and then more coffee, an internship program forwarded by email, comments on a class assignment, or advice on a job application. In my experience, mentoring these students involves a series of tiny and ordinary moments that can sometimes stretch out over several years but that usually end, often abruptly.

Genuine Callings Support Each Other

Genuine duties support each other. We might put it into vocational language by saying that genuine callings support each other. Our families can motivate and support our educations; our educations can enrich and support our families.

^{Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first edition}

Victor Frankenstein is the most irritating protagonist I’ve ever met. Yet I love teaching Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein and exploring the questions it raises, questions not only of what Victor creates but the process by which he creates it. Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is no doctor, but a college student who deals with a predictable college student issue: keeping in touch with home. As he fails to visit or even write to his family, he remembers his father’s words: “I know that while you are pleased with yourself, you will think of us with affection and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected.”

“Is his father right?” I ask my students. Is failing to write really a sign that he’s neglecting his other duties? His work is what’s keeping him from writing. Isn’t his research also a duty, deserving focus? Is it even possible to do his kind of work and do other things, like keeping up his family relationships, at the same time?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez on Holding Things Loosely

The hosts of NetVUE’s podcast Callings recently sat down for a conversation with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University.

The hosts of NetVUE’s podcast Callings recently sat down for a conversation with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Since the publication of her New York Times bestselling book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020), she has been in the middle of intense public debates about faith, nationalism, and gender in American Evangelicalism. In this episode, Kristin shares some of the story behind that story, reflecting on the role that historical research plays in public life.

Supporting LGBTQIA+ Students in the Pursuit of Meaningful Work

As educators and advisors, we best serve our queer students not by adopting a one-size-fits-all kind of approach but rather by helping them understand and articulate the relationship between their sexual and gender (and other intersecting) identities and their emerging and evolving professional interests.

A few years ago, one of my queer-identified students shared with me some resume advice they had received from a colleague in our career center: not to include their internship at an LGBTQIA+ advocacy organization because potential employers would respond negatively. This advice confused and frustrated the student. They were out, and their queer identity had played an important part in their vocational discernment. This internship had reinforced their sense of calling by clarifying and strengthening their emerging professional commitment to work in the queer community after graduation. Not surprisingly, this student wanted to know what I thought they should do.

Race/Class/Gender, Privilege, and Vocation

A compilation of blog posts on Vocation Matters (2018-2022). Some pieces will be meaningful to students while others are more relevant for prompting discussion with colleagues.

As you put together materials for teaching or programming with students, you may want to consider these posts about vocation that examine race, class, gender, social location, and privilege. Some pieces will be meaningful to students while others are more relevant for prompting discussion with colleagues.

On privilege (general)

Counter Story-telling in The Purpose Gap (April 2022)

Neighbor Love, on Jason Mahn’s new book (November 2021)

Vocation Revisited, Part 2 of a conversation about vocation and privilege (August 2021)

Attending to Voices (October 2020)

“The Whispers of the Spirit”: Discerning Meaning in the Work of Justice (July 2020)

The Hard Realities of Reduced “Bandwidth” (June 2020)

Resiliency vs. Audacity (May 2020)

Privilege and Lies: Some Problematic Myths about Vocation (April 2019)

Vocation in an Interconnected, Interdependent World (August 2018)

On race and class

On the Problems with Colorblind Mentoring (April 2022)

Strength and vulnerability, an interview with Mary Dana Hinton (January 2022)

Transgressive Teaching, the impact of bell hooks (December 2021)

Seeing Constellations rather than Stars (December 2021)

The Push and Pull of Vocation in The Chair (October 2021)

Vocation Revisited, part 1 of a conversation about race, class, privilege, and interfaith engagement (August 2021)

The Gift of Intervention (December 2020)

To “Know Thyself” One Must “Know Thine History” (November 2020)

#Pissedoffpastor in Kenosha (September 2020)

The Power of Proximity on Just Mercy (August 2020)

Courageous Texts, Courageous Teaching (August 2020).

Wrestling with White Supremacy, about the work of Richard Hughes (February 2020)

Growing Up In Between: Some Thoughts on Formative Tensions and Vocational Discernment (July 2019)

Complex Turning Points: Vocation and Social Location (March 2018)

Vocation Enmeshed (October 2013)

On sexuality and gender

Queer Embodiment in a Vocational Journey (November 2021)

Conviction and Covering (September 2021)

Gay on God’s Campus, an interview with author Jonathan Coley (June 2021)

Coming Out Into Vocation (June 2021)

Dragged Into Vocation (June 2021)

For Young Women Who Have Considered Their Becoming (January 2019)

Other posts about diversity

Familismo, Success, and Service to Others (May 2022)

Twelve Ground Rules for Dialogues on Difference (November 2020)

Rethinking and Unlearning: Imagining New Ways of Being in Community, an interview with Nimisha Barton (October 2020)

Institutional Identity and Diversity (February 2020)

Building Multi-cultural Competency (January 2020)

The Change a Difference Makes (January 2019)

Last updated on June 5, 2022

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Tag: gender

Re-visioning Humility as a Virtue for Vocation

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Our Students’ Vocations and the Gift of (Un)Gendered Language

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Rethinking Vocation in Gender and Sexuality Studies

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Mentoring in Community

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Genuine Callings Support Each Other

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Kristin Kobes Du Mez on Holding Things Loosely

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Supporting LGBTQIA+ Students in the Pursuit of Meaningful Work

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