Integrating Vocation in the Academic Disciplines

Hope College, Holland, Michigan
May 29–31, 2025

• Event Registration
• Hotel Registration

This NetVUE regional gathering seeks to help faculty members and academic departments integrate vocation into disciplinary programs and courses.  

Academic disciplinary courses have sometimes been relegated to the margins of campus vocation initiatives. Other important areas of campus life — general education, career development, student life, and religious life — often serve as the center of vocational programming and culture-building. This gap creates a compelling opportunity for students to connect vocation to the knowledge and skills of academic disciplines, particularly as students’ central point of vocational focus is often grounded in their major field. When an institution pairs courses within the academic majors with vocation initiatives already at work on campus, it helps build a network for every student to be engaged in vocational exploration with multiple touch-points.

The event will be part conference and part workshop. Prior to the event, faculty are encouraged to consider particular areas within their academic department and/or bring a specific course for consideration for redesigning in a way that significantly integrates vocation. We will spend time considering vocation integration at the departmental and course levels. Experienced colleagues from various institutions will model and support this work throughout the event. 

GUIDING QUESTIONS

We will explore guiding questions, such as

1. How are you defining and experiencing vocation institutionally and departmentally?
2. How do you tell the story of your discipline?
3. How can you further align disciplinary study, meaning, purpose and preparation to thrive in professional contexts within your major and/or a course?
4. What epistemologies, methodologies or theories might serve as models of vocational inquiry? 
5. How might students come to know your discipline’s vocation, find belonging in your department, and journey through your major in relation to these questions?
6. How might we better incorporate experiential learning and/or traditional career development in disciplinary courses within the context of vocational exploration?

SPONSORS

In addition to the generous contributions from NetVUE, this event is further sponsored by the Hope College Center for Ministry Studies through a generous grant by the Lilly Endowment, as well as the Boerigter Center for Calling and Career.