Engaging with Vocation on Campus

Supporting Students' Vocational Discernment through Curricular and Co-Curricular Approaches

Karen Lovett, Stephen Wilhoit, Karen Lovett, Stephen Wilhoit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000523072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Bringing together narratives and theory-based analyses of practice, this volume illustrates collaborative curricular and co-curricular approaches to promoting vocational discernment amongst students in a Catholic university setting.

Drawing on cultural, religious, and secular understandings of vocation, Engaging with Vocation on Campus illustrates how contemporary issues around vocation, work, and careers can be addressed within the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition. Chapters presents a range of contributions from students, faculty, and staff from a single institution to highlight practical approaches to supporting students in this area, and acknowledge the complementary and intersecting roles played by student support services, academic staff, and on-campus ministry in helping students develop an individualised understanding of vocation. Considering the value of both curricular or non-curricular activities and processes, the volume highlights spiritual, personal, and community value in offering students explicit and tailored support.

This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in higher education, religious education, and the Christian life and experience more broadly. Those specifically interested in career guidance, theological curriculum and pedagogy, and Roman Catholicism will also benefit from this book.

1 IntroductionAn institution-wide commitment to vocation in the Catholic intellectual tradition

Stephen Wilhoit and Karen Lovett

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176596-1

All of the chapters in Engaging with Vocation on Campus were written by faculty and staff at the University of Dayton (UD). Some are classroom teachers; others deliver student support services. Though the specific context of their interactions with students at UD varies, all of the authors are working toward the same goal: promoting student vocational discernment. Vocation has long been an institutional learning goal at UD, but in recent years we’ve seen an exponential increase of interest in vocation and calling across campus. As the chapters in this volume attest, at UD vocation informs course and assignment design, residential living programs, career development, and faith formation. Just as importantly though, it also impacts the personal and professional lives of our faculty and staff. For a number of reasons, the value and importance of vocation or calling as a defining educational and professional development goal has been increasingly realized across our institution.

In this introduction, we’ll offer a brief history of vocation as an institutional learning goal at UD. We’ll detail actions taken over the past few years that have resulted in renewed interest in vocation across the curriculum and co-curriculum here and prompted the innovations in course design and student support programming detailed in the book. Finally, we’ll offer an overview of the chapters themselves. Our hope is that those reading this book will be inspired to promote student, faculty, and staff vocational discernment at their own institutions.

Located in Dayton, Ohio, with a campus that spans the Great Miami River, the University of Dayton is a Catholic, comprehensive university founded in 1850 by the Society of Mary – the Marianists. Comprised of the College of Arts and Sciences, three professional schools (Business Administration, Engineering, and Education and Health Sciences), and a law school, it offers 77 undergraduate degree programs and 59 graduate. UD enrolls a little over 8,000 undergraduate and 2,700 graduate students. The university is highly residential. More than 90% of students live in dormitories or in one of more than 300 university-owned houses located on the north and south sides of the campus.

As a Marianist institution, from its inception UD’s institutional learning goals have reflected key aspects of the Catholic intellectual tradition (CIT): seeking knowledge in a sacramental spirit; learning in, through, and for community; cultivating practical wisdom; critically reading the signs of the times; and supporting the discernment of personal and communal vocation (Berendt, 2017; Brady, 2013; Cahalan, 2016; Cernera and Morgan, 2000; Ehret, 2011; Habisdch and Loza Adaui, 2011; Hellwig, 2000; Prusak, 2015; Royal, 2015). In The Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Mission of the University: A Continuing Conversation (2012), the University of Dayton reaffirms a number of connections between the CIT and the university’s mission and institutional student learning goals.

That 2012 document builds on an earlier report that had a profound effect on the nature and structure of education at UD. In 2005, a group of faculty, staff, and administrators known as the Marianist Education Working Group led a campus-wide discussion to determine “how the common academic program for undergraduates should express the ideals of university education in the Catholic and Marianist traditions” at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Habits of Inquiry and Reflection, p. 6). Its 2006 report, Habits of Inquiry and Reflection: A Report on Education in the Catholic and Marianist Traditions at the University of Dayton identified seven institutional goals to guide student learning across the curriculum and co-curriculum. Regardless of major, every student’s education at UD would be built around scholarship, faith traditions, diversity, community, practical wisdom, the critical evaluation of our times, and vocation. Concerning vocation, the report notes:

Education in the Catholic and Marianist traditions strives to support academically students’ efforts to find and explore the deep purposes that lend meaning, wonder, and fulfillment to their lives. These purposes consist not merely in what students may find themselves especially fit for pursuing but in what each student is specially called to do. The university’s commitment to support students’ discernment of their vocations in academically appropriate ways follows from the fundamental objective to educate whole persons, in mind, spirit, and body, for whole lives.

(Habits of Inquiry and Reflection, 2006, p. 6)

Drawing on Catholic and Marianist traditions, a central goal of UD is to educate the whole person and to support each student’s pursuit of meaning, purpose, and truth by exploring their individual callings and social responsibilities (see Brady, 2013; Cahalan, 2016; Cernera and Morgan, 2000; Hellwig, 2000; McCool, 2000).

Since the publication of Habits of Inquiry and Reflection faculty and staff at UD have revised majors, courses, and programs to reflect these seven institutional learning goals. Though these efforts resulted in many successes, work was often hampered by the abstract nature of the goals. To address this problem, in 2016, the provost charged small groups of faculty and staff to examine each learning goal and recommend strategies for addressing them more effectively. The group examining vocation issued a White Paper in 2016 that included a new, clearer institutional definition of vocation:

Answering a call to discover one’s unique gifts and employ them in service for the common good in ways that are personally satisfying and bring meaning to one’s life.

(“The Vocation Learning Outcomes at the University of Dayton”)

This definition reflects Jerome Organ’s (2017) argument that vocation involves both doing and being: discerning not only what one ought to do in life but also how one ought to live that life. For Cernera and Morgan (2000), this dual conception of vocation also reflects key aspects of the CIT:

At a Catholic university, the fundamental questions of Who am I? Whose am I? Why am I here? and, Where am I going? are of critical importance. The Catholic tradition continually raises the question “How shall we live?” as human persons with intellectual, emotional, communal, moral, and spiritual needs and desires.

(p. 210)

The White Paper also outlines several claims concerning vocation or calling that, as an institution, we hold to be true:

• a call is an insight to take a particular action or adopt a particular path in life
• a call’s source may be external – a summons from God discovered in faith and community – or internal – a sense of purpose or direction that arises organically from within – or some combination of the two
• a person may come to realize his or her vocation instantaneously or slowly over time
• vocations change, and at any point in a person’s life, he or she is likely pursuing multiple callings
• vocation assumes that every individual has unique gifts to share with others, a combination of skills, talents, knowledge, interests, and experience no one else possesses
• in college, students may be preparing themselves for a vocation they will pursue later in life (entering the pre-med program, for example) while at the same time discovering talents and interests they didn’t know they had (skill as a painter or public speaker, for example)
• acting on one’s vocation brings joy and a sense of personal fulfillment
• by pursuing their vocations, people define their life’s purpose
• vocation is formed and pursued in community, recognizing and acting on one’s responsibility to assist and form mutually supportive bonds with others in pursuit of the common good (“The Vocation Learning Outcomes at the University of Dayton” 2016).

Finally, the White Paper identified several ways faculty and staff across the curriculum and co-curriculum at UD might help students discern their vocations.

Following a recommendation in the White Paper, a new group of faculty and staff from across the curriculum and co-curriculum was formed to guide vocation-related initiatives on campus, the Vocation Implementation Team (VIT). The VIT has undertaken a number of initiatives to promote the vocation learning outcome on campus, efforts which contributed to some of the course and program innovations detailed in the collection’s chapters. Some of the more impactful actions have included:

• hosting workshops where faculty and staff could respond to the revised definition of vocation and identify ways it might inform their work with students
• bringing speakers to campus to discuss vocation and vocational discernment
• offering retreats where faculty and staff can reflect on their own callings and vocational journeys
• leading book reading groups focusing on vocation

Since its inception, the VIT has actively encouraged and supported all interested faculty and staff at UD to integrate vocation into their courses and programs.

In 2018, the VIT successfully applied for a Vocation Across the Academy Grant from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE). With these funds, the VIT began offering faculty and staff mini-grants to help them incorporate vocation into their courses and programs (several authors included in this collection were recipients of these grants), initiated a series of year-long workshops designed to help faculty and staff more effectively address vocation in first-year courses and programs, and created vocation-related online resources for the university community.

The University of Dayton has not adopted a centralized, institutional approach to promoting vocational discernment on campus. The VIT, made up of volunteer faculty and staff, is the group promoting vocation on campus. Instead of prescribing how faculty and staff ought to address vocation, course and program revisions are evolved more organically. Still, as you read these chapters, you’ll notice several key themes that now characterize UD’s approach to vocation. Many of the themes reflect the ideas articulated in the 2006 vocation White Paper. Some reflect strategies the VIT has employed to promote vocation across the university. Still others reflect grassroots practice of UD’s faculty and staff: as they collaborated on approaches to vocational discernment and shared their results in workshops and informal conversations, several institutional best practices have emerged. Here are some of the defining characteristics of UD’s approach to integrating vocation across the institution that have emerged over the years:

• Vocation should be integrated into both the curriculum and the co-curriculum.

Vocation is an institutional learning goal – achieving it is the responsibility of the entire university community. Academic courses, co-curricular programs, residence life, and student support services, all have a part to play in ensuring that students have ample opportunities to reflect on, discern, and live out their life callings. Vocation could not be assigned to a particular discipline, program, or administrative office. Instead, everyone involved in our students’ education was invited to determine how they could best contribute to realizing the vocation institutional learning goal.

• Efforts to address vocation must include the work of faculty and staff.

Both faculty and staff need to be involved in promoting vocation on campus. As on most residential campuses, students spend less time with faculty than they do with other members of the university staff. Recognizing this, at UD we deliberately involved faculty and staff from across the institution to join efforts to address the vocation institutional learning goal.

• Addressing vocation successfully requires creativity, innovation, and flexibility.

Faculty and staff are invited to create opportunities for vocational discernment that fit the needs of the students they are working with and the course or program they are delivering. They are encouraged to promote vocational discernment in ways that best match the content and structure of the course or program they are teaching or delivering as well as their students’ needs and level of development, assuming that how one discusses vocation is a senior capstone will be different than in a first-year seminar.

• Unite faculty and staff initiatives around a ...