Tag: maps

The Meaning of Dinosaurs: Embedding Vocation in the Major

This project aims to fill the gaps between introductory vocation lessons in the first-year seminar and culminating activities in the senior capstone to offer students the chance to make connections and discern vocation after declaring a major—typically in sophomore- and junior-level courses such as historical methods.

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 

For Joel, it started with dinosaurs. Reading about them, collecting them as toys, and drawing them stand out among his childhood memories. He filled his wandering map with meaningful moments, including the time a teacher gave him a fossil. Ultimately, a circuitous line connecting one history-related experience after another emerged. As he took stock of 20 years of memories, colorfully scattered across a poster board, he saw a pervasive lifetime love of history that inadvertently led him to his undergraduate major.

Continue reading “The Meaning of Dinosaurs: Embedding Vocation in the Major”

The Cartography of Vocation

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Commercial map of the British Empire.

Cartographers try to render clear a patchwork of people and place, land and history.  As the poet Ciaran Carson suggests, “With so many foldings and unfoldings, whole segments of the/ map have fallen off” (“Queen’s Gambit”).   Maps embody, in pieces, cultural thought and human experience.

The map is an oft invoked image for discussing life’s purpose—indeed, upon my arrival at NetVUE’s Teaching Vocational Exploration summer seminar we spent time both drawing our own vocational maps and explaining them.  This exercise proved disorienting (I prefer to think in words, not images) and also expanding, in that I started to think of my vocational journey as a sort of constellation map.  On it, I noted bright spots in my past—my undergraduate mentor, reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch for the first time, studying abroad, professional achievements—and I also saw how the darkness of other aspects of experience offered direction. Continue reading “The Cartography of Vocation”