Tag: resonance

Rethinking Vocation in Gender and Sexuality Studies

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. 

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Responding to AI with a Resonant Education

From the first day of class this fall, we must show students that they are entering a space of possibility—a space where not knowing and the beautiful risk of engagement can lead to purpose, meaning, and resonance.

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When I became the inaugural director of St. Lawrence University’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Assessment in the fall of 2022, I was worried about student engagement and mental health coming out of the Covid pandemic. As that academic year ended, however, I was also alarmed at the ways increasing social media usage coupled with widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT present us with existential challenges that feel insurmountable.

I am not alone. The Surgeon General released a report noting the ways social media use can “pose a risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” And you cannot do any type of faculty development in 2023 without someone raising the question of AI and the future of teaching and learning.

As we approach the fall semester, I offer the concept of resonance—drawn from the work of sociologist Harmut Rosa—to think about how to address what I see as the interconnected dilemmas of the ongoing student mental health crisis and the rise of AI, especially ChatGPT.

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