Tag: teamwork

Vocation and Pedagogy IV: Learning and Discerning in Community

Engaging students in vocational questions should begin even before explicit discussions about vocation occur. Educators can leverage specific skills taught in classes to enhance students’ vocational exploration. In collaborative learning environments, intentional structures, like role assignments, enable students to develop essential listening and interpersonal skills, fostering both academic success and vocational discernment.

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.

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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.

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The Vocational Benefits of Group Projects

Group projects can elicit anxiety and resistance among students due to the necessary reliance on peers. Despite the challenges, collaboration aids personal and vocational growth, fostering essential skills for future workplaces. These projects enhance connections, aid self-discovery, and help combat loneliness, ultimately enriching students’ educational experiences and understanding of teamwork’s value in their careers.

Whenever I announce a group project, it often evokes looks of uncertainty or concern on my students’ faces. They know that such work will force themselves and their team members to rely on each other as they work toward a common goal. Differences in perspective, work ethic, and schedules will also undoubtedly emerge.

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But while life would certainly be simpler if we worked alone, it wouldn’t be nearly as rich. We need other people; we need community.

Our vocational pursuits could be described as ongoing group projects. We’re typically more productive when we work with others, and in academic settings, collaborative projects can enrich students vocationally through self-discovery and connections with others. When students work with their peers and receive feedback about their contributions, they discover strengths and interests they may not have known they had.

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Building a Vocational Praxis of Teamwork

This post explores how community-engaged learning (CEL) fosters vocational exploration through teamwork. It highlights the transformative potential of collaborative experiences, enabling students to enhance communication skills and discover their personal and communal responsibilities. Real-life examples illustrate how teamwork can significantly impact personal growth and understanding of vocation as a shared journey.

A series on the role that community-engaged learning can play in vocational exploration and discernment.

silver and black pens on a black surface
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As previous posts in this series have illustrated, community-engaged learning (CEL) is a powerful pedagogy for facilitating vocational exploration. This post builds on those insights to show how opportunities for teamwork in CEL projects can further deepen vocational work. Most faculty members recognize that teamwork enables students to construct knowledge together, simulating the kind of collaboration, problem-solving, and communication that is ubiquitous in professional environments. Indeed, teamwork promotes the vital skills that the National Association of Colleges and Employers heralds, which include the following:

  • Careful listening,
  • Understanding and asking appropriate questions,
  • Managing conflict and making compromises,
  • Interacting with and respecting diverse viewpoints and personalities
  • Meeting ambiguity with resilience and agility,
  • Meeting one’s responsibilities, and
  • Developing strong, positive working relationships.

But teamwork also empowers students to discover their gifts and talents, to consider their life purpose, and to examine how their life journeys are, as Erin VanLaningham writes, not “singular paths,” but rather roads intersecting with and affected by others. Teamwork shows how our lives are “called forth by others,” in Jason Mahn’s framing, because it enables us to build new relationships in purposeful communities. This post provides an example of an intentionally designed teamwork experience in a CEL seminar to show how this high-impact practice of collaboration can be marshaled for vocational discovery.

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