The article discusses the integration of vocational discernment into a physics course at Pacific Lutheran University, inspired by a faculty workshop. Students engage in activities to explore their values and career paths alongside academic learning. The author emphasizes the importance of considering your cultural commute and the broader implications of vocational choices on your community of origin.
A series exploring the teaching of vocation in physics.
“The new vocation section was by far my favorite portion of the course and greatly impacted my post-university goals.”
“I wish I had done this assignment my first year of college.”
Students in my physics capstone course at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) shared these comments in their course evaluations about the new vocational curriculum that I introduced the last time I taught it. After reviewing these course materials, a colleague also wrote, “I am SERIOUSLY impressed by all that you have done with this course! It is amazing and I wish I’d had training like this when I was in college.” As a professor, there are moments when you know you’ve created something impactful. This was one of those moments for me.
Creative writing pedagogy offers valuable insights for vocational teaching across disciplines. By emphasizing storytelling, community feedback, and personal narrative, educators can guide students in reflecting on their vocational journeys. Creative writing pedagogies foster specificity, helping students articulate their experiences while navigating challenges like self-doubt and imposter syndrome.
A series of posts on what creative writing pedagogy has to offer vocational teaching in any discipline.
At a recent workshop on vocation at my university, I heard a colleague use a beautiful metaphor to describe the vocational journey: “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love this metaphor, and it’s one I know well as a creative writing instructor because the original quote refers not to vocation but rather to writing. This metaphor’s source is a Paris Reviewinterview with American novelist E.L. Doctorow, in which he describes the writing process.
It’s not surprising to find wisdom about writing popping up in conversations about vocation. After all, when we ask students to reflect on their vocational journeys, we’re usually asking them to tell a story about themselves, and creative writing is the discipline of storytelling. That’s why—in this post and those that follow—I offer several frameworks, tools, and activities from the field of creative writing that instructors in any discipline can use as they integrate vocation into their teaching and advising.
The post discusses the interplay between vocation and mythos, exploring how personal and cultural narratives shape individual identity and calling. It advocates for a critical examination of inherited stories, encouraging reflection and rewriting as means to align one’s life with values of love and justice. Mythos serves as a guiding framework for vocational discernment.
A series of posts on 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 rhetorical terms, mythos refers to the stories that shape how we understand who we are, where we come from, and what we are called to become; these stories center the deeper cultural and spiritual narratives that frame both individual identity and collective belonging. The roots of mythos lie in the Sophist tradition of pre-Aristotelian rhetoric, in which storytelling was seen not just as persuasion, but as a means of conveying truths about the human condition. Not only a rhetorical appeal, mythos is also a way of being—helping us locate ourselves within larger moral, communal, and historical arcs.
The author reflects on designing an impactful course for students that emphasized experiential learning and environmental stewardship. By integrating a campus transportation campaign and aligning with Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, the course transformed student engagement, encouraging them to connect academic work with community service and cultivate their skills, thereby fostering a sense of agency and hope.
In my first year as a full-time faculty member, I designed a course that aligned with its stated objectives even as its ultimate outcomes extended beyond my control. I embedded a campus transportation campaign into the course, uncertain whether it would succeed. In hindsight, it was an ambitious undertaking—one that reinforced the challenges and rewards of experiential learning. Such an endeavor is not for the faint of heart, but its impact was transformative, particularly in the ways it shaped my students’ understanding of vocation and their engagement with the common good. Through their participation in the campaign, students began to see their academic work as more than an isolated exercise; it became a way to contribute to a larger community, address real needs, and effect tangible change.
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).
How might my teaching change if I acknowledged that developing a capacity for friendship is a fundamental component of the overall process of learning?
This spring, I took a class on a field trip to the main campus of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, a community of Catholic women whose charism includes a call to live sustainably and work for environmental justice. Some of our course texts highlighted the natural world as an emerging source of spirituality among nonreligious young people in the US, and I wanted students to see that many traditional religious communities find God in nature, too. The question was how today’s “nones” might resonate with, well, nuns.
On a beautiful Saturday in April, we walked the immense campus and heard the Sisters’ attention to the land is rooted in their love of God and all that belongs to God. The following Tuesday, I asked the students what they had learned on the trip. My focus on course content had me looking for evidence of learning in conceptual connections, so when students’ initial responses provided such evidence, I thought “great, objective achieved.” But then someone offered a different sort of comment: “What I really liked is that we were outside walking and talking with each other. I feel like I got to know people. Obviously I’ve seen you guys all semester, but I hadn’t really seen you. Just being together like that is what will stick with me. I learned I should do it more.”
Genuine human connection: another objective achieved! Yet it hadn’t been an explicit objective because, to be honest, the weight I give to conceptual learning often relegates connection and friendship to the periphery. When it happens, wonderful, but it’s not really the goal. How might my teaching change if I acknowledged that developing a capacity for friendship is a fundamental component of the overall process of learning?
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.
The most recent episode of Callings features hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speaking with Anantanand Rambachan, scholar of Hinduism and interreligious studies and professor emeritus of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.
The most recent episode of Callings features hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton speaking with Anantanand Rambachan, scholar of Hinduism and interreligious studies and professor emeritus of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is also a co-president of the global interfaith network Religions for Peace and is active in the dialogue programs of the World Council of Churches and the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue at the Vatican. His numerous books include A Hindu Theology of Liberation and Pathways to Hindu-Christian Dialogue.
As our campuses and communities become increasingly multilingual, we ought to lift up the language classroom as a privileged space for vocational reflection where our responsibilities to the world, to each other, and to ourselves might crosspollinate in ways that honor our callings as much as they shape the future of language instruction.
Paris, La Défense viewed from Fondation Louis Vuitton Photo by the author
The language classroom provides ample occasion to cultivate vocational reflection. As a lifelong learner and educator with over 15 years of experience teaching French, I can attest to the ways in which language acquisition is inextricable from learning about ourselves, crafting our stories, connecting with others, and discerning how to live an intentional life. Take the example of a beginning language program, in which courses are commonly structured around topics of everyday relevance such as friends and family, education and professions, pastimes, and holidays and traditions. Self-reflection and self-authorship are embedded in the program because learning a language is, in effect, learning to live, communicate, and move in the world in and through this language.
You, too, can incorporate visualizations—word clouds, concept maps, 2×2 matrices, diagrams, charts, and dashboards—into your teaching to enhance your students’ vocational exploration. I detail a few visual-based exercises below along with short instructions, examples, and possible variations to get the ideas flowing.
Do most of the vocation-focused assignments or activities that you do with students revolve around the written or spoken word? That’s exactly what I found when I was invited to team-teach the second iteration of a vocational exploration seminar for 70 first-year honors students. We had a great syllabus of readings, reflection papers, lectures, and small-group discussion questions, but, as a design professor, I was having difficulty delivering in one mode. Students were also struggling to stay engaged with little variety in our format.
I began looking for ways to include visual-based exercises. Each week, my colleague and I would look over the materials to determine one that we would shift into a visualization. We started small by adding visual components to worksheets: meters and scales for students to fill in as supplement to their written answers. To enhance small-group discussions, we invited groups to create collective Venn diagrams and affinity diagrams in response to questions.
Portion of a “To whom shall I listen?” worksheet featuring a volume bar for students to fill in to the appropriate level.
