Vocation, Higher Education, and the Future

Educating for vocation offers colleges and universities a pathway for navigating uncertainty and contemporary challenges. As these institutions prepare students for the future, reflecting on questions of meaning and purpose can help them build resilience and imagine new and different ways of thinking, doing, and being. This volume argues that vocation cultivates courage and hope. Teaching vocational exploration for career and life readiness invites students to navigate the unknown while imagining possibilities for the future. Collectively, the authors enrich and expand a sense of calling to prioritize relationship-building as well as institutional and structural change. The contributing scholars explore vocation through innovative approaches to pedagogy, mentoring, leadership, and community engagement. Their chapters argue that educators across the academy must cultivate moral courage as we accompany students in approaching challenging realities. This involves orienting vocation toward political engagement, resisting injustice, navigating emerging technologies, and responding to environmental threats; it also involves prioritizing deep listening, observation, and interconnectedness as part of discernment. Across the volume, readers will find practices for vocational reflection that help connect current callings to future purpose. The chapters illustrate how vocational hope and imagination can prompt a renewed and even new calling for individuals and institutions. Vocation, Higher Education, and the Future meaningfully considers challenges across the academy while offering grounded and creative examples of people exploring professional and personal purpose. In so doing, the contributors invite educators and students to learn to love the future.