Tag: teaching

The Craft of Teaching (and Learning): Carlo Rotella

The latest episode of NetVUE’s podcast Callings features Carlo Rotella, a writer and professor at Boston College. His book, What Can I Get Out of This?, explores teaching undergraduates and emphasizes meaningful engagement in the classroom. Rotella advocates for seeing education as a practice requiring persistence and presence, underscoring its relevance beyond mere career preparation.

Carlo Rotella

NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released a new episode, which features an interview with Carlo Rotella, an award-winning writer and professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College. His most recent book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics gets at the heart of what it means to teach and to learn together with undergraduate students today. Carlo has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine since 2007. His work has appeared in collections like The Best American Essays, as well as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Slate, and various scholarly periodicals. Recurring subjects in his writing are cities and city life, boxing, music, crime, basketball, neighborhoods, and how people get good at things. He is co-editor and founder of the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Visions and Revisions book series.

As his career and his most recent book illustrates, Carlo is interested in the nuts and bolts of teaching—what he considers its craft and the ways we can build classroom experiences that help our students make meaning. The book follows the experience of a single cohort of students in a required introductory literature course, most of whom are not English majors. In it, Rotella tells the story of what happens when students practice discussing ideas and readings with each other over a semester and then follows up with them a few years later, revealing that the course’s impact yielded an impactful return on investment in one’s education and life. As he describes it, one of the things it explores is “how to be a student, how to do college,” helping educators better understand how our students experience and live out their vocations as students.

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The Power of Sticky Notes in Teaching Vocation

Teaching can be challenging, especially regarding discussions about vocation. The use of sticky notes emerges as an effective tool for fostering engagement and connection among students. They encourage manageable tasks, promote interaction, and help individuals share their values and fears, facilitating deeper conversations about purpose and community in a supportive environment.

Teaching is hard. Teaching vocation may be even harder.

It can be tricky to bring a new audience of students, educators, or really anyone into conversations about vocation. It requires true vulnerability—both among participants and from their facilitator—to get folks to think and talk about their past, present, and future; their values and desires; and especially their doubts and fears. We need tools that can help us speak and listen to each other, lowering the stakes of group activities while at the same time increasing engagement in them.

What if I told you I knew of such a tool? In fact, a wonderous tool—one that is inexpensive, widely available and almost infinitely adaptable?

person writing on pink sticky notes
Photo by Bruno Bueno on Pexels.com

May I present to you: the humble sticky note.

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Our Students’ Vocations and the Gift of (Un)Gendered Language

This post emphasizes the importance of gender justice in higher education, particularly in language and pronoun use. It discusses the need for inclusive teaching methods that recognize diverse gender identities, while also critiquing traditional practices that may marginalize LGBTQIA+ students, including the compulsory sharing of pronouns. The author advocates for fostering supportive environments that promote vocational exploration for all students.

hands joined against progress pride flag
Photo by Lisett Kruusimäe on Pexels.com

Gender justice—both in and through language—is fundamental to my vocation. As an out queer faculty member, I center the power of language, narrative, and agency in my teaching and in my mentoring relationships. My courses span topics from French language to Francophone world cultures, and LGBTQIA+ literature to queer and feminist theories. Accordingly, gender and sexuality are embedded throughout them as forces that shape our day-to-day lives, the institutions we inhabit, and their linguistic norms. At the same time, my students and I grapple collectively with how we contribute to reinforcing or disrupting these concepts and how we might activate them to empower or to constrain.

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What Is Our Work Now?

The members of my department have worked together for over a decade… We know intimately how twined and tangled the personal and the professional are for those of us who out live our teaching vocation.

Our Religion department chair always begins meetings with a round of check-ins. The check-in question changes, but the invitation to share from something professional or personal is always there. This feels right—perhaps because the members of our department have worked together for over a decade. Or maybe because we know intimately how twined and tangled the personal and the professional are for those of us who out live our teaching vocation.

This week, a department member opened our check-in saying, “I’m having a rough day, but I’m doing my best in this moment to be present to the work.” Before I could think, I blurted out, “I’m also having a rough day, but I’m not sure what our work is now.”

On the surface, my comment made no sense. The agenda for the department meeting was clear: discuss core curriculum revisions, construct a shared assignment on “identity” for all first year religion and theology classes, and set hiring priorities for the fall (we lost three faculty this academic year). But eight weeks into the semester, five semesters into the pandemic, and two plus years into educational upheaval, my confusion was real.

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Grind, Burn, Pivot, Give: How Young Professionals Talk About Vocation

Craig Mattson has interviewed many young professionals about their work experiences and their lives following graduation. This is the first in a series about what he has learned and how it might inform our work with young adults about vocation.

Craig Mattson has interviewed many young professionals about their work experiences and their lives following graduation. This is the first in a series about what he has learned and how it might inform our work with young adults about vocation.

Professors should pay more attention to two vocation stories that circulate in the first decade after college.

The first is the Grind Story. Sometimes this sounds like a saga of sailing far oceans and seeing strange creatures. But the plotline usually caps off with, “I’ve been working like 70-hour weeks, and it’s super hard, but I’m gonna get there.” Sometimes, this story sounds cheerfully heroic, like the guy I talked to who’d started an organization called Grind Greatly. Sometimes, though, the voices sound pretty grim.

The second narrative is the Burn Story. This dystopian tale about torching capitalism has three essential plot points: (1) Burn (2) Everything (3) Down. I don’t hear this story very often, honestly. Let’s just say that it doesn’t fit the aesthetics of a LinkedIn post. Still, some early-career professionals have so much to do and so little power to do it with that they wish they could tell the Burn Story.

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Creative Agency: A Lutheran’s Perspective

How does the idea of self-creation apply specifically to teaching vocation? And at what point does our teaching vocation become a system?

 Philipp Otto Runge’s Color Sphere (Die Farbenkugel), 1810. Wikimedia. Public domain.

Teaching vocation requires the instructor to strike a balance between making too much or too little of vocation. A good balance works out differently for instructing first-year students than it does for instructing seniors, and it likely works out differently for undecided students in a liberal arts college than it does for majors in pre-professional programs in a comprehensive university.

In my experience having also taught vocation concepts outside the academy, a priority for vocational discernment and reflection seems dependent on the audience’s affinity or urgency for conceptual frameworks. I generally have a more difficult time getting people who work in “fast time” vocations—action-, labor-, and task-oriented—to be energized by vocation concepts than those people who work in “slow time” vocations—thought-, relationship-, and process-oriented. I can only imagine the reactions I’d experience teaching vocation to people who are insecure about the things I take for granted; I speak from a point of privilege and to people who enjoy degrees of privilege.

What got me thinking about how much to make of vocation was an essay by Danish professor Anders Michelsen, in a book for Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition, Your Color Memory. Michelsen’s essay is titled “Color and Self-Creation,” and it uses color systems to explore creative agency and cultural contingency. A phrase repeated in the essay is, “We create systems that create us.” This claim, confined to the domain of color, is elaborated by a historical overview of color theory that concludes with, “We organize our colored world around systems that are increasingly of our own making . . . by adaption, exclusion, interpretation, and creation.”

Against what prevails in culture as a hesitancy about color, Michelsen argues for the positive value of self-creation systems and for their creative agency. Color grants humans the field for deciding, reflecting upon, and setting color systems; color systems are modes of human imagination. If readers are interested in how this framework leads to a “politics of creation,” you may want to become familiar with David Batchelor’s Chromophobia, 2001. {For an excerpt, click here}.

Michelsen’s essay takes me in a different direction, however. How does the idea of self-creation systems apply specifically to teaching vocation concepts?

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Vocation Revisited, Part 3: Interfaith Engagement and Relationships

Can the word “vocation” work in interfaith contexts, or does it sound too Christian?

A conversation facilitated by Anita Houck with Professor Stacy Davis (Religious Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies, Saint Mary’s) and two graduates, Romona Bethany, now Group Violence Intervention Program Manager for The City of South Bend, and Sophia Funari, currently a student in the M.Div. program at the University of Notre Dame. For Part I of their conversation, click here, and for Part II, click here.

Can “vocation” work in interfaith contexts, or does it just sound too Christian?

Stacy Davis: Vocation suggests a path in life that God has called one to take. I think such language can be problematic for religious and non-religious people. For those who are religious, I think it can create a great deal of anxiety. What if I don’t know what that path is? What if I pick the wrong one? For non-religious people, the language may be too religious to be useful. With growing numbers of young adults having no religious affiliation, the term itself may not make sense to them, even if the idea of living a meaningful life does. This is not to say that students cannot and should not learn from multiple religious perspectives, but for non-religious students, I’m not sure “vocation” can ever work as a completely secular term… Young people want their lives to have meaning, and I agree with you that meaning should not be limited to how you make money. I just think that the word “vocation” carries some baggage that may take too long to unpack at this point.

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Should biography be used to teach vocation?

The biography of earthly giants—celebrities, superstars, or icons in their domain—can challenge vocation in a foundational sense: Is my calling single-minded, all about me and my needs? Does my enthusiasm for a calling excuse me from certain ethical responsibilities to other people?

Personal narrative, a kind of informal autobiography, has become a popular and useful framework for approaching the subject of vocation with young people. Personal story-telling which aims at inclusion and belonging is a common technique in first-year-experiences courses. This strategy for approaching vocation can be enriched by supplementing first-person reflection with meaningful examples pulled from more formal biographies.

Biographies may be part of an essential reading list in vocation, and reading biography might feel especially natural to our time because we give priority to the individual and to our own importance as individuals. In the arts, since the Renaissance—and more recently, through Romanticism—individual genius and an expectation for individual originality are requirements brought along in almost every artist’s training, and they have become codified in the academy through the studio art major.

I have a special interest in biographies of visual artists—mostly painters, and mostly painters whose output inspires my own or serves as examples for my students. My hunch is that if you read biography, there’s a good chance its subjects are from the spectrum of your own domain or professional interests. While reading biographies of people from inside our domains may help us show young aspirants the vocation of our domain, we must also be aware of the limitations of relying too heavily on biographical narratives to teach vocation.

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Making the Best of Course Evaluations

When we teach students how to give useful feedback, we’re doing vocational work… We’re demonstrating that we value their insights in the present, recognizing they have the ability—perhaps even the responsibility—to help us be better teachers and help the institution live out its vocation.

The problems with course evaluations are many, well documented, and probably insurmountable. Evaluations consistently demonstrate bias based on factors such as race and ethnicity and gender (for instance, when online instructors lied about their gender, they saw statistically significant favoring of instructors whom students thought were male). Even when carefully designed, they’re unreliable indicators of teaching quality and liable to be used inappropriately in decisions about rank and tenure. And if that weren’t enough, research has confirmed that students give courses significantly higher scores if the instructor brings cookies on course-evaluation day. 

The bad news is that course evaluations probably aren’t going anywhere. The slightly better news is that a vocational approach might help. One place to start is by actually teaching students to give useful feedback. Just as we have to teach students to write lab reports, literature reviews, and essays, we need to give them at least some sense of how to write in the genre “course evaluation.” That’s true especially since the default model for evaluating anything has become comments on the internet, ample trolling included. If we don’t teach students anything else, we shouldn’t expect anything better. 

When we teach students how to give useful feedback, we’re doing vocational work. First, we’re helping them develop a skill they can contribute to their communities in the future; after all, giving feedback well is essential in classroom and career, in friendship and family. Second, we’re demonstrating that we value their insights in the present, recognizing they have the ability—perhaps even the responsibility—to help us be better teachers and help the institution live out its vocation. Finally, by encouraging them to reflect on their education, we’re tapping into the value of metacognition, which enhances both learning and ownership of learning.

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A Call for Empathy and Honesty

Teaching in the shadow of threats to our health, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our very environment demands that we begin to foster in our students both empathy and honesty.

Los Angeles, June 2020. Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash

America faces an unprecedented combination of challenges—a pandemic, historic economic disparity, a racial reckoning, and the threat of global climate change. Moments of crisis like this test our most basic moral foundations; the four major crises we face now challenge us to embrace the two fundamental elements of morality: empathy and honesty. 

As we teach in the shadow of these crises, we must cultivate a capacious empathy, which would embrace everyone, especially those with whom we struggle to agree or even understand, and an ardent demand for honesty, first from ourselves and second of those whom we engage. If we are to overcome these crises—and the next should we endure the combination now facing us—we must rediscover these two core principles of all moral behavior and use them to forge a way forward.

Central to our ability to build relationships is our capacity to feel empathy for others. (This is a contested claim; I prefer a virtue ethic, so I lean toward this view, but here is one example of the debate: “Does Empathy Guide or Hinder Moral Action?”). We must recognize the basic humanity, at a bare minimum, of others, if we are to enter into the relationships that morality governs. Without empathy, other human beings are merely objects to be manipulated or avoided.

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