Sometimes, engaging undergraduate students in questions of vocation starts before the first explicit conversation about it. As educators, we often teach them specific skills in our disciplinary contexts that can lay a strong foundation for vocational exploration later in their college experience. Taking advantage of these opportunities can strengthen our students’ academic and vocational capacities.
Few places render confusion more conspicuous than a first‑semester general chemistry laboratory. This first (and sometimes only) lab experience makes it abundantly clear that students don’t know how to work together, regardless of their level of technical skill. The lab setting—its space, structure, and time—intensifies interactions and amplifies students’ insecurities and their interpersonal dynamics (even as the same kinds of interactions play out in small group work and projects in other classrooms). Learning is (and should be) hard, but learning alongside others adds additional variables, making it more complex and difficult. And as students continue to turn to AI for quick and easy answers, the friction of collaborative learning will become even less comfortable and productive.
Learning how to work together is not just a problem in the sciences (or other academic fields). It’s also essential for vocational exploration, which is not an individual activity, but one that occurs within a complex relationship between individuals and communities. As David Cunningham reminds us, vocation “requires us to do this discernment in the presence of, and with input from, other people.” Both vocational discernment and collaborative learning make use of fundamental skills: being able to listen to others—to be with and learn from them. These are skills that students don’t necessarily learn to value or develop on their own.
Spaces like a lab—where students often feel an urgent need to develop skills to support their academic success—provide a powerful opportunity to strengthen practices and habits needed for vocational discernment. Every classroom has its own set of rules and interactions about the value of listening to and working with others, norms that teachers and students establish together, implicitly and explicitly. For students who might be skeptical of such expectations, time in the classroom offers them the chance to try new things, to build skills, and through practice, to strengthen their imagination about what deserves their ongoing time and attention.
It is easy to underestimate how much intentional work it takes to prepare students to be fully attentive to other people. We should not take for granted that they are experts in doing so or even know how to do it well; instead, we should provide intentional scaffolding (sometimes called high structure) around these kinds of important skills. According to Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, “all students appreciate and thrive from additional structure, and some benefit disproportionately.” High structure does not hurt students who are already skilled in a particular area, but it does make a significant difference for students with a skill deficit.
When I taught chemistry, I was especially interested in helping my students learn with and alongside each other, both of which are essential to succeed in science. Doing so also provided an important opportunity for them to develop skills needed to discern their vocations, especially in the presence of others and with their input. A helpful pedagogical tool that supports this kind of collaboration is Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), which was developed a little over 20 years ago as a new approach to learning chemistry. Since then, it has expanded to other disciplines, although it is still primarily used in STEM. In “Team Construction and Accountability”—a chapter from a helpful introduction to this approach—the authors describe a process of setting up successful small groups for shared learning, in which one of the essential steps is to assign roles and to provide resources so that participants can fulfill them. Each student is assigned a unique role that supports the completion of the group task. They receive a role card that describes not just what job they have, but what they could say to others as part of their role (reducing the cognitive load of the task). The role cards are different colors, so it is easy to know who has which role in a group.
When I first tried this approach, I worried that students would find it overbearing. Instead, they were relieved. Students sometimes joked about the role cards or dramatically exaggerated the phrases when they used them, but they appreciated the clarity that the cards provided and reported feeling less frustrated with their classmates. Taking on roles during group work gave students time to practice listening to their peers and interacting more thoughtfully with them. When these kinds of interactions were successful, students began to value working together and learning from each other.
Individual and shared reflections about this experience are a key part of this structured group learning activity. (To reinforce their value, I recommend including the reflections as a part of the assignment’s official grade.) These reflections are also a strategic moment to center the vocational elements of this activity. As a team, students were asked to reflect on what they did well and how they could improve working together in future activities. Individually, they also responded to these questions: What happened when you made space for and listened to others? What is the value of developing this skill for your work in science? Later in the semester, I broadened this last question, asking them to reflect on how developing collaborative skills helped them consider what kind of scientist they hoped to be. As they responded to these questions, students became increasingly attuned to the value of paying attention to others and the need for cultivating intentional listening practices in other classes and areas of their life.
When integrating vocation into a curriculum, it can be helpful to remember that we cannot have every conversation about vocation with students in every course. In fact, in any given course, it can be most effective to focus on a single skill, reflection, or conversation that also supports other learning and development in that class. Students develop skills as their courses require them to, and they can be even more motivated to do so when they see them as preparation for a career that interests them. The long-term development of skills and professional preparation is an important part of vocation. At the same time, these skills can also support broad vocational goals of a lifelong posture of discernment.
What happened when you made space for and listened to others?
What is the value of developing this skill for your work in science?
How does developing collaborative skills help you consider what kind of scientist you hope to be?
As individual faculty members identify what skills they are well positioned to teach students in their context, they can work alongside their colleagues to connect these experiences into meaningful conversations that unfold over the course of an undergraduate student’s career. Ultimately, this work is most impactful when it is part of a shared vision with common language that students experience across the curriculum.
As I conclude my series, I will share in my next and final post how I bookend this intervention with first-year students with a conversation with senior students that explores how the scientific skills they have developed can support a call to live vocationally as members of a community.
For other recent posts on the importance of teamwork, collaboration, listening, and attentiveness in relation to vocational exploration and discernment, see Brian Bowman, “The Vocational Benefits of Group Projects” and “Active Listening as Vocational Discernment,” Heather Brady and Amy Patterson, “Building a Vocational Praxis of Teamwork,” and Jennifer West, “The Attention Gym: Building Capacity for Attentiveness in the Classroom.”
Rachael Baker is the associate director of NetVUE. Visit her author page on this blog for the other posts in this series, where you can also find other posts by her.
