One of the greatest gifts of working in higher education is the opportunity to connect: with students, with colleagues, and with community. Educators focus on such connection throughout the academic year—as students learn and grow through all aspects of their undergraduate experience. The Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) hosts an annual Big Read program, which offers member institutions a significant way to deepen connection around our common purpose of helping students discern their callings and lead meaningful lives, while helping us connect with each other on our campuses.
The Big Read is a way for campus leaders to invite others into conversations about vocation and to cultivate expertise in vocational exploration across campus and within different parts of the undergraduate experience. The program provides an opportunity to engage with NetVUE resources, including this blog, the podcast Callings, the scholarship of vocation, and Studies in Vocation and Calling, NetVUE’s new journal. It can bring fresh and challenging ideas to the ways you might be thinking about vocation. It also can build meaningful connections and community, helping seasoned and new colleagues—faculty members, staff, and administrators—forge a common purpose. Reading can be, as I’ve written elsewhere, a “catalyst for considering and contributing to collective well-being.”
This year’s Big Read selection in Norman Wirzba’s Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. The book invites all of us to think about the ways we are connected and empowered to create a “welcoming and nurturing community in which people can dream, explore, and develop the potential that is uniquely theirs.” The book draws from science, literature, theology, personal storytelling, and history as it explores finding hope through action.
On September 16, NetVUE will kick off this year’s Big Read with its first webinar, which will feature the book’s author, Norman Wirzba, as he reflects on its major themes. Later in the fall, a webinar in November will host a panel that includes a theologian and an environmental scientist, who will discuss different disciplinary facets of the book. In the spring, a third webinar will explore vocational narratives from the perspective of science, literature, and art. (These webinars are all open to any individual who works at a NetVUE institution, but you do have to register to be able to attend them.) NetVUE member institutions that plan to read the book in a group setting can receive up to 20 copies at no cost.
Do you work at a NetVUE institution? Interested in bringing the Big Read to your campus? Gather a few colleagues, and—in consultation with your NetVUE Campus Contact—consider the ways a Big Read experience could work in your context. In past years, NetVUE institutions have adopted several different approaches for their Big Read programming. One institution’s president has drawn upon its history and traditions and with the director of its center for vocation, co-hosting a series of “small chats” or discussions with participants. Another institution discovered a great hunger among its staff for reflective conversation and focused its attention on this group, creating a cohort for them to read and reflect together. Others sponsored more traditional reading groups comprising faculty members that met fairly frequently—every few weeks—to discuss the book, chapter by chapter. One campus brought the author of last year’s Big Read into the conversation and hosted her on Zoom for its final meeting. In whatever way you might proceed, rest assured that engaging in the program offers much to your campus. As one institution reported, “the participants remarked on how nice it was to gather—not just for the food but also the uplifting and hopeful conversations. The discussions were a place where frustrations, fears and more could be shared. Yet, the chapters kept the conversations aimed toward hope and possibilities.”
“The discussions were a place where frustrations, fears and more could be shared. Yet, the chapters kept the conversations aimed toward hope and possibilities.”
You don’t have to develop your approach alone. NetVUE offers some key resources to support your work. Members of the staff have prepared a discussion guide to help leaders work through the book, no matter your experience or expertise. If you are planning to come to the one of the NetVUE Regional Gatherings in September or February, you could attend a free pre-conference workshop about leading and launching the Big Read on your campus. The sequence of webinars (described above) can connect your campus conversation to others across our network. Finally, this blog will feature a series of posts designed to prompt disciplinary conversations and personal reflection.
This is the fifth year of NetVUE’s Big Read program; if you believe that an earlier selection would fit better in your context, you can also participate in the program using one of the previous Big Read books.
NetVUE’s hope for you and your campus is that this program invites you in a much larger conversation about educating our students for vocation and for exploring your own vocational purpose. Once you’ve decided on an approach, work with your Campus Contact who can fill out the form available on NetVUE’s website and apply to participate in the program. Once approved, you will receive your free books.
We hope you’ll consider engaging the Big Read this year on your campus and look forward to hearing about its impact on your community—especially as it fosters engagement, interest, and commitment to seeking and teaching about “hope in a time of crisis.” According to another participant in last year’s Big Read, this opportunity gave their campus “a mechanism to break down silos across departments and schools. . . . It was a great way to discuss our own callings and journeys in order to get to know one another better, and also to talk about the ways we interact with our students over questions on callings.”
We would love to see you at one of our many regional gatherings this year as a place to continue connecting in this nuanced and important conversation about vocation. These opportunities provide a way for those of us who work in higher education to find renewed purpose in our daily work and enrich connections with students and each other.
Erin VanLaningham is NetVUE’s director of project development. In this role, she directs the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project, co-hosts the NetVUE podcast, Callings: Conversations on College, Career, and a Life Well Lived, and serves as book and resource review editor for the NetVUE journal, Studies in Vocation and Calling. At her home institution—Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa—she serves as professor of English and special advisor to the president. She is the editor and contributor to Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good (Oxford, 2024) and co-editor of Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies (Edinburgh, 2022). In 2017, Erin participated in the inaugural NetVUE faculty seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration.
