St. Olaf was recently awarded a $6,835 grant from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) in order to support its vocational development programs. Professor of English and Associate Dean of the First-Year Experience and Sophomore Thriving Diane LeBlanc will be using the funds to study existing data on these programs.
St. Olaf has worked with NetVUE for years through program grants focused on vocational education — efforts that help define vocation, support campus discussions around the concept and integrate it into advising. According to the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values and Community, vocation is defined as “life on purpose. For the common good.” Vocational education encourages students to reflect on what gives their lives meaning and how their work contributes to their communities.
This is the first time that NetVue has offered individual project grants, making it unique from other grants St. Olaf has received.
LeBlanc and a team will be looking at information collected about sophomores from advising in the fall, belonging, athletics, Sophomore Symposium feedback and more, to determine how students found thinking about vocation useful and what moments would benefit from increased support.
“Just looking at the current behavior, if we can identify moments in a student’s pathway [during the] sophomore year when they could be more international about thinking about vocation … and by vocation, I don’t mean something that’s out there in the future, but [rather] what you are doing right now, what you think you’re good at, how you think you contribute to community, and what you want to do with that in the future,” LeBlanc said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger.
LeBlanc’s focus on the sophomore experience stems from an awareness of gaps in the sophomore year structure. Currently, the first-year experience is clearly defined, juniors have structure from their majors, and seniors have large projects and a search for what they’re doing next.
“That leaves the sophomore year, [in] which we’ve known for about 40 years [that] in higher education there is a dip in programming, in structure,” LeBlanc said. “A lot of students take some courses in their major, they do OLE Core classes, some will study abroad, but it’s really hard to define what being a sophomore means.”
LeBlanc’s study will help to identify moments in the student pathway where programming could have been more intentional in discussing vocation. This smaller project designed by LeBlanc will help St. Olaf build for larger projects in the future. When asked about future projects, LeBlanc said, “We are trying to do this one year at a time … the junior programming will come, and maybe that will be part of another grant where we say, ‘How do we support vocation in the major because it’s not a given?”
Beyond St. Olaf, LeBlanc looks forward to speaking with other institutions about how their undergraduates experience vocation in order to share ideas, gain new insights, and build on research being done at St. Olaf.
