Loyola University Chicago

At Loyola, we know that an increasing number of faculty and staff believe strongly that living an extraordinary life begins with asking oneself key vocational questions such as: Who am I?  Whose am I?  What do I enjoy and how can I combine my loves and talents to make a difference in this world?  At Evoke, we believe that everyone has a vocation, or a calling, and that helping students explore questions of vocation (such as those raised above) is central to a Jesuit education.  Like Frederick Buechner, we believe that living an extraordinary life begins with tapping into the still, small voice inside of us that connects our “deep joys” with the world’s “deep hungers.”

The Vocation Seminar is an unique experience available to faculty and staff at Loyola. Evoke began offering a Seminar on Student Vocational Formation in January 2007. Through this seminar, we hope:

• To provide an engaging forum for faculty and staff to explore their interests in students’ vocational formation;
  
  
• To encourage and support faculty and staff explorations of how they might incorporate their deepening understandings of student vocational formation into their daily work with students; and
  
  
• To provide a supportive context – what Sharon Daloz Parks refers to as a “mentoring community” – in which faculty and staff who are concerned about students and their “callings” may connect with, learn from, and support each other around this common goal.

This seminar is modeled on a similar initiative at Boston College.  Through their Lilly-funded “Intersections” program, over 225 faculty and staff have completed their semester-long “seminar on student formation.”  Through it, they have formed meaningful relationships with their colleagues in various departments, deepened their understandings of vocation, and creatively applied their new learnings to enhance their teaching, research, advising, and relationships with students.  At BC, two concrete measures of the impact of this seminar include the number of past seminar participants who enthusiastically endorse the seminar to other colleagues and the creation of over two dozen freshman and senior capstone courses that now incorporate the theme of vocation as a central focus.

We have seven objectives for our eight sessions together:

• To form a mentoring community among seminar participants that encourages their interest in student vocational discernment and “feeds” their desire to discuss this interest with faculty and staff peers in the university
  
  
• To identify and better understand the issues in student vocational formation
  
  
• To explore the role of faculty and staff in this formational experience
  
  
• To relate these insights to faculty and staff development and, in particular, to seminar participants’ own “callings” and “call stories”
  
  
• To integrate vocational formation with the Jesuit educational tradition and especially with the Ignatian tradition of discernment
  
  
• To enlarge the number of faculty and administrative staff who are part of the discussion about undergraduate vocational formation
  
  
• To encourage faculty and staff to incorporate into their work attitudes and practices that facilitate students’ vocational discernment.

Expectations for Participation

We anticipate that the seminar will be valuable in and of itself, providing faculty and staff with opportunities to discuss issues related to students’ vocational formation, their own roles as faculty and staff in this process, and the Ignatian perspective that can illuminate these topics in ways distinctively appropriate to Loyola University Chicago.  Our overall goal for the seminar, therefore, is to provide a rich and supportive enough context in which participants will feel the freedom to dialogue openly with one another, thereby cultivating fresh insights into how they might do their work “more vocationally” with students and one another at Loyola. 

To concretize this operationally, participants are expected to do the following:

• Attend all eight seminar sessions;
• Complete all required readings;
• Participate actively in seminar discussions and related in-class assignments; and
• Toward the end of the seminar, write:
  
  a brief (2 – 5 page) proposal for integrating one or more themes from the seminar into their work at the university, OR
  
  revise an existing syllabus for a course that is inclusive of one or more themes from the seminar, OR
  
  construct a 2 – 4 page essay that narrates the participant’s own “call story.”