Tag: identity

Being and Becoming in Community: Hearing Vocation through the Indigo Girls

The author reflects on how the Indigo Girls’ music influenced their understanding of identity and community, especially during adolescence in a restrictive environment. Their songs foster kindness, activism, and self-reflection, serving as a catalyst for personal growth and social awareness. The music is portrayed as a bridge between the secular and sacred in life.

a couple lying down while playing ukulele
Photo of two young people enjoying music together by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

The practice of discerning and living into one’s callings is often deeply influenced not only by overt barriers but also by implicit messages that shape what seems possible in our lives. As a child of the 1980s, I yearned for representation that countered the oppressive gender roles in the world around me in the small northern Michigan town where I grew up. Most viscerally, I noticed my own discomfort with the pervasive narrative that I would have a husband and children someday, regardless of what my paid work would be. In my adolescence, queer life was invisible; but when I listened to music, I experienced a sense of being-in-community and was invited into self-reflection about who I was called to become.

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Understanding the Student-Athlete Transition: Opportunities for Vocational Conversation

This post discusses the challenges student-athletes face during the transition from sports to life after college, highlighting issues of identity loss, depression, and social disconnection. It advocates for supportive conversations about vocational paths and emphasizes the importance of understanding these unique challenges to help student-athletes navigate their new realities effectively.

The first post in series on vocation and student-athletes.

woman in blue and white basketball jersey holding brown basketball
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In the third semester of my graduate studies, I realized it was not for me, and I needed to call home to discuss dropping out. It was the first time ever that I had not wanted to attend school; in fact, I had been looking forward to the focused coursework. I had always planned to go to graduate school, but what I couldn’t account for were my feelings of being lost and disconnected. I finished my bachelor’s in May and started graduate school in July, so there was little time to process my undergraduate experience. There was even less time to process the loss of my athletic career, something that had been a driving force in my life for a solid decade. I played three sports a year from the seventh grade until I graduated from college. My identity as an athlete was deeply ingrained in my mind—it was how I identified with the outside world and how the world acknowledged me. When I graduated, that part of me seemingly stopped, but I had no way to understand what was happening.

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Philosophy for Life: Kwame Anthony Appiah

The final episode of this season of NetVUE’s podcast features Kwame Anthony Appiah, an influential philosopher and professor at NYU. He discusses his journey from Ghana through England to the U.S., highlighting the significance of liberal education and the need for students to think critically about diversity and moral dilemmas rather than being told what to think.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

The most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings brings listeners an interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah. One of the world’s most influential philosophers and public intellectuals, he writes about political philosophy, ethics, diversity and identity, the philosophy of language, and African intellectual history. Kwame was raised in Ghana, educated in England, and now is professor of philosophy and law at New York University. He is the author of many books and articles, including Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, as well as the author of the popular “Ethicist” column for the New York Times Magazine, which offers advice on life’s trickiest situations and moral dilemmas. The winner of the 2024 John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity from the Library of Congress, Kwame currently serves as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Ethos and Vocation

The post examines the connection between vocation and rhetoric, particularly focusing on the concept of ethos. Reginald Bell, Jr. reflects on his father’s influence on his ethos, contrasting it with modern religious figures promoting materialism. He emphasizes the importance of an ethos rooted in love and encourages educators and students to embody this kind of ethos as a way to foster positive societal change.

This post is the first in a series of four that explores the relationship between vocation and rhetoric, focusing on how ethos, logos, pathos, and mythos offer a fresh perspective for creatives, educators, and scholars to conceptualize their professional and personal callings.

Reginald Bell, Jr.

In February 2020, I found myself in the pulpit in Phoenix, Arizona, ready to deliver the message of a three-night revival. My father—a significant influence in my life and vocation—had flown in with my mother from Birmingham, Alabama, to support me and to introduce me on the revival’s second night. Among the many things he said during his introduction, one statement resonated deeply and has stayed with me ever since. “My son’s biggest problem his entire life,” he said, “is that he always thought he was me, Reginald Bell, Sr.”

This statement reflects more than our father-son dynamic; it also represents how ethos is transmitted, often subconsciously, from one generation to the next. It made me ponder how much my father has shaped my own ethos, and how, as educators, our ethos invariably influences those we teach.

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Teaching Trans Vocation

First and foremost, our trans students must experience our classrooms as hospitable spaces that integrate their entire selves, explicitly embracing their gender and sexual identities as meaningful sites of knowledge.

In the final chapter of Leslie Feinberg‘s 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues, Jess Goldberg, the novel’s trans protagonist, attends a lesbian and gay political rally in New York City. As Jess listens to the speakers testify to the oppression they have experienced, she realizes, “This is what courage is. It’s not just living through the nightmare, it’s doing something with it afterward. It’s being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It’s trying to organize to change things.” This encounter sparks Jess’s queer calling, one that allows students who read the novel to see their gender and sexual identities as playing important roles in the discernment of their vocations.

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Conviction and Covering

The activism of resistance against such pressures to conceal, repress or cover many expressions of my identity helped me to maintain the convictions of my calling.

After watching the Netflix series about academia, The Chair, I’ve been thinking about its many connections to teaching as a calling that is imbued with a vivid sense of purpose. Series executive producer Amanda Peet, in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, spoke about how impressed she was with the deep sense of calling she found in the faculty with whom she spoke as she developed the script. For me though, I was most engaged with the capacity of the women characters in the series to maintain that sense of calling amid the difficult racial and gender dynamics that they experienced with some of their white, male colleagues. These relationships—full of invalidations, microaggressions, bias, racial and gender discrimination, and harassment—were depicted in a realistic way that, frankly, made me squirm with anger and discomfort at times. As depicted in the series, their sense of conviction about the deeper meaning and purpose of their work helped them to both resist and navigate through the very real obstacles.

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Coming Out into Vocation

Through our teaching and advising we can create opportunities and supports for LGBTIQ+ students to better understand and affirm their experiences of disruption and coherence, assisting them in their efforts to integrate this knowledge into vocational discernment.

New York Pride March, June 2019

I love the celebrations of Pride Month in New York. Some are solemn in remembrance of the violence, both historical and recent, that has been perpetrated against queer-identifying persons. Some are political as they seek to push for legislations to protect LGBTIQ+ persons, especially trans persons, in this moment of backlash. Some are totally celebratory—perhaps best seen in the vibrant, raucous, joyful, and diverse affirmations of pride, dignity, and equality evident at the annual New York City Pride March. For Queer persons, the common theme of “pride” animates an energy to make visible and affirm an authentic sense of self and of community that transgresses normative understandings of gender and sexuality, thereby creating a more inclusive understanding of humanity.

This drive for authenticity and visibility grounds the work of vocational discernment.  Indeed, for LGBTIQ+ persons coming out to a deeper understanding of our gender identity and sexuality centers the search for meaning and purpose in our embodied lived experience. Embracing our authenticity, even as it pushes us up against what is considered “normal,” illuminates the directions we must take for greater vocational clarity. We can make an impact in our LGBTIQ+ students’ lives when we help them embrace and celebrate their gender and sexuality as a strength and a resource to draw upon in the process of discerning their vocation. For students from marginalized communities this effort can make it possible for them to see beyond barriers put in their way because of systemic injustice. For students who are LGBTIQ+ this can literally be a lifeline to survival. As we seek to educate and advise students towards vocational development, we can partner with our LGBTIQ+ students in ways that help them to understand themselves more fully and assist their capacity to integrate that knowledge with their emerging sense of vocation. 

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The gift of intervention

Intervention, from its Latin root intervenire meaning “to come between,” begins as an encounter and grows into a a relationship that triggers the possibility of reinvention, redemption, and belonging.

In my senior year of high school I received a gift that brought transformative opportunities to my life as time went by. Senior year marked the beginning of my third year living in the United States after immigrating from Mexico at age 15. If being an adolescent can be confusing and stressful by itself, being transplanted from a place of comfort to an unknown, new environment complicated my sense of self even more. Like many immigrants experiencing culture shock, I felt like an outsider early on; like many newcomers, I tried to be seen and be listened to by others the best I could. To me this meant trying to excel socially, athletically, and academically. Lacking self-confidence and having to continue to work on my English language skills, I didn’t do too well in the first category. Instead, I tried to play sports and to focus on my studies. In my first try at sports sophomore year, I didn’t make it through the first try-out day for the soccer JV team. As a junior, I barely made the JV basketball team. To this day, I think the only reason I made the team was because the coach was also my History teacher. My good grades in his class more so than my athletic abilities had to have awoken his compassion to let me be on the team.  

Pueblo High School in Tucson, AZ

Senior year was a different story. With nothing to lose, I tried out for the tennis team. In those days, Pueblo High School on the South Side of Tucson was an underperforming school. Only a handful of students in each class had hopes of attending college, me being one of them. In my senior year, the school needed new tennis coaches for the boys’ and girls’ teams. That same year, two Pueblo High alumni who had been student-athletes in the early 1970s returned home after finishing their respective medical residencies. Their commitment to community not only gave them the vision to someday open a community health clinic, which one of them did years later, but to volunteer together as coaches of the tennis teams at their old high school. The dedication to community and education was the gift my teammates and I received from our coaches, Dr. Frank Gomez and Dr. Cecilia Rosales.  

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Digital Drag and Discerning What’s Real

During their college years, our students are learning to claim the power to engage and shape reality. The digital landscape is a part of this, and we serve them and ourselves well to take it as seriously as we do other parts of life.

A review of Chris Stedman’s IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives (Broadleaf Books, 2020).

I was travelling in Germany for three weeks with students while reading Jean Twenge’s book iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. It seemed like a good idea to read about this generation while spending an extended amount of time living with twelve of them. Among other things, Twenge convinced me that “iGen” was a better name for this cohort than the commonly used moniker Generation Z, which is of course a derivative generational marking – remember when the now-named Millennials were Generation Y? This GenXer does. 

The name comes from the fact that “members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. … iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010” (Twenge 2017). They have the distinctive experience of being the first to navigate adolescence and now emerging adulthood with a smartphone nearly always in their pocket and social media an ever-present factor of life.

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Vocation Virtually: The Importance of People

We are all part of communities or groups that claim us, communities that we claim. It could be a family, a faith tradition, a sports team, a choral group. It could even be a campus community like mine, where “We are called |Auggies.” Being an “Auggie” means belonging to a particular community that orients around certain values, like service, intentional diversity, being a good neighbor.

Part 4 of a series describing an electronic “vPortfolio” (vocation portfolio) developed at Augsburg University and centered on five metaphors for vocation: place, path, perspective, story, and people.

A fourth metaphor for vocation is people. Vocations are crowded, populated with individuals and communities that clarify our callings. This can happen negatively. “I never want to be like that!” More often, it happens positively. “I admire this person or those people.” Understanding this metaphor positively cultivates the sense that “If you’re with me, I can be my best self.”

The metaphor of people or relationships brings attention to the complex relationship between individual and community. What communities do I claim? And what communities claim me? I belong to my wild and crazy family, even if I didn’t choose them and they didn’t choose me. I belong differently to my university, my professional colleagues, my church community, the people in my neighborhood, my friends and fellow travelers. Again, I chose some of these people; others chose me. In a friendship or marriage, two people continue to choose each other day after day. Each of these relationships marks its members with certain values and certain practices or rituals of belonging. 

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