Tag: purpose

Sustaining Our Vocations with Purpose and Joy

This post introduces a co-authored series addressing the vocational challenges faculty members face in higher education. The authors share their personal experiences as they reflect on their own vocational shifts at work. They emphasize the need for a sustainable approach to vocation, highlighting key themes like recognizing limits, the importance of community, and cultivating joy in their work to support faculty thriving.

The first post in a co-authored series on what faculty members need to thrive vocationally.

female teacher looking stressed
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After receiving the news that I, Elisabeth, had been awarded tenure and promoted in the spring of 2023 at age 39, I felt elated—and then, immediately burned out. Certainly, the summer before, when I submitted my application, had been arduous. My family sold and bought a house, we moved, my husband started a new job, my kids started at new schools, and we all got COVID. Then the school year seemed to fill every possible nook and cranny of time. As news of this milestone spread, colleagues asked, “How do you feel?” I answered, “I need to figure out how to do this job sustainably and with joy. Or I need to do something else.”

I, Kristin, accepted my first job as an assistant professor in 2021 when I was 37 years old, following five years of graduate school and ten years as a high school teacher. I enjoyed teaching but was ready to pursue research and writing more intentionally. By the time I turned 40, I had developed seven different courses across four programs and was serving on several committees, mostly unrelated to my research. I realized I needed to pivot and try again, or I would never reach my research goals before going up for tenure.

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Reclaiming Vocations: Finding Purpose Amidst Loss

This post opens by reflecting on a mock funeral at Montclair State University that protested cuts to humanities and social sciences, highlighting deep grief in higher education. This shared sense of loss prompts a need for vocational recommitment. The podcast episode featuring Victor Strecher illustrates how purpose can guide healing, emphasizing the importance of meaningful work amidst adversity.

gravestone with a concrete cross
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A photo from a recent news article in The Guardian stopped me in my tracks. It featured a black tombstone memorializing 15 departments within the humanities and social sciences facing cuts at Montclair State University, where students organized a mock funeral in protest of this proposal. At the top of the tombstone, a large RIP dramatically introduced the list of the departments, starting with anthropology and ending with English.

This story is an all too common one across higher education right now, leaving students, faculty, and staff in a state of grief over profound vocational dislocations as their callings are being devalued by college administrators and policymakers. This student-organized funeral resonated with me upon my return from a recent retreat for educators, who gathered to reclaim our vocational visions and voices. One undercurrent in our conversations was a deep sadness for all that has been lost in higher education in recent years: departments slashed, dedicated colleagues terminated, harmful narratives about our work increasing.

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Reengaging Students Through Vocational Discernment and Significant Learning

Offering vocational discernment activities simultaneously with knowledge generation activities may provide an integrative and applicative means by which to engage students.

A series of posts about a collaborative project at the University of Dayton to develop courses, programs, and opportunities for undergraduate vocational discernment in the health professions, including a first-year course, “Discover Health and Medicine.”

At some point in the past couple of years, I think all of us in higher education have asked ourselves why our students seem to be so disengaged. More students seem to lack the ability to pay attention for an entire class period. They miss deadlines or do not seem to care about their academic success or progress. Worse yet, some students just disappear altogether with no explanation and refuse to respond when we reach out to offer assistance.

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Why go to college?

Why do young people go to college? In a short piece in Inside HigherEd this week entitled “A Not-So-Tidy Narrative,” Michael Horn and Bob Moesta share some of their findings, which were published this past fall in Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life (Jossey-Bass, 2019). The book explores the constellation (and complexity) of reasons that prospective students choose the college they do, and serves as a good reminder that it is about much more than “getting a job.”

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“Learning to Do it Well:” Life, Love and Work in Middlemarch

Middlemarch was published serially over twelve months from 1871-1872

George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch was published nearly 150 years ago, in 8 installments from December 1871 to December 1872. Victorian readers would have had plenty of time to speculate on the characters’ decisions and lives as they awaited the next chapters to be published.  Waiting, you see, was part of serialized reading.

Taking a year to read a novel is an elusive experience for contemporary life centered on binge watching serial television or listening to episodic podcasts.  Immersion has its place, certainly, in a world that is fragmented and demanding, but reading over a period of time affords insight and transformation that compressed immersion does not.

“What is the quality of your waiting?” I once heard a spiritual leader ask.  Academic calendars don’t encourage waiting but our vocational discernment clocks, which should be set for a longer, more deliberate reflection, can. The quality of our waiting can allow us to respond with purpose.

Middlemarch is a novel about vocation—some might even argue, the novel about vocation. It portrays life slowly unfolding before us. Many have seen the novel as a guide to deliberating a professional path, to navigating adulthood, to choosing a marriage partner, to surviving small-town life. More broadly, a recent BBC poll ranked Middlemarch as the greatest British novel.  Continue reading ““Learning to Do it Well:” Life, Love and Work in Middlemarch”