IST1000-6OL-FA14 - Vocation and Orientation

Instructor: Vince Tango vtango@iliff.edu 303-765-3106  Office Hours: By appointment

Questions? Post here.

The topic of our quarter together is the ongoing process of vocational discernment, with particular attention to how vocational journeys intersect with the experience of formal theological education. The texts for this course will weekly articles, the lives of the students and instructor, the lives of the mentors you choose as living conversation partners, and historical partners accessed through autobiography or oral history.

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Through our work together over the quarter in a small group setting, we will attend to the following four purposes (Here are the

 MDiv

 

 

that these course purposes support).:

  1. Providing a small group “sacred space” where students can come to know one another, including their different faith understandings and traditions, at a deeper level than is usually experienced in their other courses. Sacred space has the expectation of honesty, transformation, and healing. It may sometimes be uncomfortable, much as athletic training can be challenging in a way that does not harm, but yields greater strength and skill.
  2. Introducing new students to Iliff, and assisting them in understanding and adjusting to the framework and characteristics of theological education, which are somewhat different from those in other kinds of educational programs students may have experienced in the past. Students will be invited into agency about their negotiation of these experiences throughout their time at Iliff.
  3. Assisting students to reflect theologically on their personal and professional identity, and their ongoing vocational discernment. Focus will move back and forth between who we are as unique individuals and the needs of institutional contexts for particular kinds of leaders.
  4. Beginning the development of personal and professional skills required to work effectively across difference in North American multicultural society.

This course is graded pass/fail (P/F) and students pass the course with a minimum of 77%. (C+)

A passing grade requires that students regularly post the required assignments and respond to their classmates in a timely fashion. Posting later than the posted deadlines may affect your grade and inhibits conversation among the small groups and the learning of your classmates.  Missing more than one weekly posting assignment may be grounds for failure of the class. Please be diligent in order to enable your own and your classmates’ learning. 

1. Participation:  This class depends on the participation of students in order to provide a learning community for one another.  Because participation is so central to the learning experience, regular, timely participation in the online and class activities is essential to pass the course. Students will engage in weekly online journaling in which they put their own experiences in conversation with their historical or living partners around the themes. Students should respond to each other's posts throughout the course. Peer responses are not graded, nor are there expectations that students will respond a certain number of times or every week. Aim for at least 4-5 responses in the quarter. 

2. Reflection Journals:  These draw on your interactions with your historical partner and your mentor interviews and become one of the texts for the course for your instructor and classmates.

3Discussion Questions:  These discussions will draw together your experiences as you encounter theological education, your encounters with the common readings, course texts, your spiritual practices, and your ever-unfolding sense of vocation.  

4. Final Project: The final project is an image, song, poem, or other representation of your vocational journey.  See Final Project for more information.

 

 

 

 

1. Students in this course are required to choose one autobiography, spiritual memoir, or oral history of a person who has chronicled their vocational journey over a significant portion of their life. You might choose this person, (“historical partner,” ) because you have admired them, because you know little about them and want to know more, or because their life shares important commitments or identity features with your own. Mostly, it should be someone you are willing to spend ten weeks getting to know better.

2. There will be common readings (articles or book chapters) posted on Canvas for each week of the course. See syllabus or modules for the readings. 

As you move into the busy-ness of graduate theological education, you may discover that you may lose connection with the deep currents of being that brought you into this study. Part of staying connected with one’s sense of vocation is taking time to listen for the deepest meanings and broadest visions that fund our work.  One way to do this is by maintaining a spiritual practice that helps us to keep our focus, maintain our center, and stay grounded in what really matters.

A requirement of this course is to commit to a regular spiritual practice that helps you stay attuned to your own sense of calling and direction.  Because the practices that are life-giving vary from person to person, you have the freedom to choose a spiritual practice that resonates with your spirit. This may be a traditional spiritual practice from a specific religious tradition, such as lectio divina or Zen meditation. Or it may be a less-traditional practice that you understand helps you to stay in touch with what is the most important reality for you, such as keeping a journal, reading the poetry of Mary Oliver or the essays of Wendell Berry, engaging an art form such as playing the piano or sketching, meeting with a spiritual director, listening with full attention to music that inspires you, or walking in silence each morning.

Below there are brief introductions to several practices, and you are invited to try one of them on for size if you don’t have a spiritual practice already in place that works for you.

Declare your spiritual practice HERE. 

Examples

You have the freedom to choose what spiritual practice you will engage, but please engage it with discipline, focused attention, and regularity (for an hour or so once a week, or for 10 minutes daily). I know this is difficult to maintain in the midst of everything else, but part of living into your vocation is engaging in practices of listening and self-care that help sustain you in the midst of the busy-ness of daily life.

 

1. Morning journalling practice, from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way:

Morning Pages.docxPreview the documentView in a new window 

2. Ignatian Examen (an historic Christian daily prayer practice)

examen-pdf.pdfPreview the documentView in a new window

3. Lectio Divina (a prayerful practice of Biblical reading):

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Catholic/2000/08/How-To-Practice-Lectio-Divina.aspx

4. Guided Meditation (Tara Brach)

http://www.tarabrach.com/audioarchives-guided-meditations.html

5. Yoga

6. Prayer with sacred texts

7. Centering Prayer (Fr.Thomas Keating explaining)

Thomas Keating Centering Prayer Guidelines Intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IKpFHfNdnE

As you move into the busy-ness of graduate theological education, you may discover that you may lose connection with the deep currents of being that brought you into this study. Part of staying connected with one’s sense of vocation is taking time to listen for the deepest meanings and broadest visions that fund our work.  One way to do this is by maintaining a spiritual practice that helps us to keep our focus, maintain our center, and stay grounded in what really matters.

A requirement of this course is to commit to a regular spiritual practice that helps you stay attuned to your own sense of calling and direction.  Because the practices that are life-giving vary from person to person, you have the freedom to choose a spiritual practice that resonates with your spirit. This may be a traditional spiritual practice from a specific religious tradition, such as lectio divina or Zen meditation. Or it may be a less-traditional practice that you understand helps you to stay in touch with what is the most important reality for you, such as keeping a journal, reading the poetry of Mary Oliver or the essays of Wendell Berry, engaging an art form such as playing the piano or sketching, meeting with a spiritual director, listening with full attention to music that inspires you, or walking in silence each morning.

Below there are brief introductions to several practices, and you are invited to try one of them on for size if you don’t have a spiritual practice already in place that works for you.

Declare your spiritual practice HERE. 

Examples

You have the freedom to choose what spiritual practice you will engage, but please engage it with discipline, focused attention, and regularity (for an hour or so once a week, or for 10 minutes daily). I know this is difficult to maintain in the midst of everything else, but part of living into your vocation is engaging in practices of listening and self-care that help sustain you in the midst of the busy-ness of daily life.

 

1. Morning journalling practice, from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way:

Morning Pages.docxPreview the documentView in a new window 

2. Ignatian Examen (an historic Christian daily prayer practice)

examen-pdf.pdfPreview the documentView in a new window

3. Lectio Divina (a prayerful practice of Biblical reading):

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Catholic/2000/08/How-To-Practice-Lectio-Divina.aspx

4. Guided Meditation (Tara Brach)

http://www.tarabrach.com/audioarchives-guided-meditations.html

5. Yoga

6. Prayer with sacred texts

7. Centering Prayer (Fr.Thomas Keating explaining)

Thomas Keating Centering Prayer Guidelines Intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IKpFHfNdnE

Your “mentor,” is a living person with whom you have a relationship and who is willing to have three to five in-depth conversations with you over the next few months. This should be a person who has sustained a sense of vocation and integrity in their work over time and who is someone that you respect and hope to learn from. They don’t have to be older than you, nor do they have to be in a professional position that you hope to attain. Rather, they are a mentor to you in that they seem to live their life with purpose, commitment, balance and other things you value.

Once you have identified a prospective mentor, contact them and see if they are willing to have three to five, hour-long conversations with you in which you will talk about their formative years, their calling into their life’s work, moments of struggle and contradiction, endings and shifts in their vocational journey, and how they have sustained themselves.

These conversations would be best in person, but can also happen by phone or Skype if you are unable to be in the same place. You will want to let them know that you will keep their name and identifying details confidential (your instructor will know them), but that you will need to share the wisdom they have given you with your classmates and professor in a password protected online conversation. If they are willing to work with you, schedule your first conversation.

Your instructor is the only person in the class who will know who your mentor is. Click "Submit Assignment" on the right. 

  • Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism
  • Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
  • Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix
  • Cornel West, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
  • Dorothee Sollee, Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian
  • Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
  • Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman
  • J. Philip Wogaman, An Unexpected Journey
  • Joan Chittister, Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir
  • John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
  • Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me – A True Story
  • Lillian Daniel and Martin Copenhaver, This Odd and Wondrous Calling: The Public and Private Lives of Two Ministers
  • Louise Zwick, Mercy Without Borders: The Catholic Worker and Immigration
  • Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor
  • Madeleine L’Engle, The Crosswicks Journals, especially A Circle of Quiet
  • Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love
  • Nora Gallagher, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith
  • Paulo Freire and Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking
  • Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic
  • Renita J. Weems, Listening for God: A Minister’s Journey through Silence and Doubt                                                                              
  • Sara Miles, Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion
  • Simone Weil, Waiting for God
  • Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

 Oral History/Memoirs available in library and for purchase from www.veteransofhope.org

Bernice Johnson Reagon, James Lawson, Ruby Sales, G. Zoharah Simmons, Andrew Young, Dolores Huerta, Anne Braden, Charles H. Long, John Biggers, Vine Deloria, Tom Feelings, Sonia Sanchez

 

Posting Guidelines

 

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Self- Disclosure in Professional Contexts

This class does not call for absolute vulnerability in self-disclosure, but rather thoughtful engagement with your own experiences as a source of learning material. The value of reflecting on your own experience is that such narratives are more likely to become a resource rather than a roadblock in your professional life. Another value is that you may learn ways to talk about formative experiences as you might in ordination or certification processes, sermons, teaching sessions, care conversations, and other professional occurrences. The disadvantage of writing about your own experiences is that you will likely need to be able to process psychologically and spiritually the memories and feelings that come from writing and talking about your own experiences.

You will not receive a better grade just because you have disclosed more information or deeper feelings than your classmates. We invite you to be thoughtful about how your personal disclosure and disclosure of the experiences of your living mentors contributes to the learning of the class. Alternatives to this would be disclosures for the sake of self-healing, attention-seeking, entertainment, or gossip. While there may be places and times for extended personal storytelling in these modes, for the purposes of this class we are not generally engaged in this kind of sharing of personal narratives. Each person is responsible for his or her level of self-disclosure. There will be no pressure to disclose more or less, either in online journals or with class colleagues in person.

Confidentiality

Personal disclosures and conversations occurring in online discussions and class conversation are not to be discussed outside of the community of learners in your section without agreement and permission of the involved parties. This is professional rather than absolute confidentiality: limits to this confidentiality include Colorado reporting laws and practices with regards to disclosure of abuse or potential harm to self or others. Due to the personal nature of some of the topics of this course, there may be times when you need to seek consultation outside of class to address emotions and reactions that have been generated in you by the experience. You, of course, have the right to seek the support of your informal circles of relationship and trust in processing issues and ideas that arise in the class that have been challenging to you. However, in doing so you cannot report what has been said by other people in the class to persons outside of the class. These conversations should be limited to discussions of your reactions and emotions to the conversation, unless you are discussing the incident in a professional consultative conversation where the practices of confidentiality are legally held (i.e. therapist, physician).

In this particular class it is especially important to treat the stories of living mentors with great respect and to offer them as much confidentiality as possible. Good practice requires that you change the name and identifying details of your mentor when talking about them in your reflection journal, unless you have been given express permission to share their stories with the group. Because professional and denominational circles can be quite small, holding these stories with confidentiality can be of special importance given that members of your group may one day be in professional relationship with the mentor you have selected.

Feelings and Emotions

Given the emotional content of reflecting on formative experiences, there may be moments when we react strongly to each other. When this happens we need to first do an internal check-in with ourselves to process our reactions, before we post our responses. Next, we need to judge whether a response would enhance group learning, or whether it is solely for the purpose of processing our own feelings. If the former is the case, we need to respond with an “I” statement that identifies our feelings, not a “you” statement, particularly one that implies a global assessment of the other person. This internal processing is especially important in blogging responses to each other in an online format because responses are more likely to come across as critical when we can’t communicate compassion through our body language or tone of voice.

Language Framework

Please use inclusive language in your writing for this class. Inclusive language attempts to respect all forms of sexual, gender, and sexual orientation diversity and to avoid terms that have been used to diminish the humanity of oppressed persons. Using inclusive language is a learning process for many students, and we will work together to move toward greater inclusivity and respect in our language.

Historical Partner (autobiography)

Reflection Journal #1 (Sept 22)

What formational experiences and communities seemed to be critical to your historical partner’s vocational journey? What provided the foundational dreams, values, and visions onto which their later vocational expressions were built? How is your historical partner's experience similar and/or different from your experience?

Reflection Journal #2 (Sept 29)

How were the energies of your historical partner recruited for something greater than herself or himself? To whom or to what did she or he feel strongly called? How and when did this yearning get named or expressed? How is this similar and/or different from your experience?

Reflection Journal #5 (October 20)

When was the vocational trajectory or self-understanding of your historical partner disrupted, challenged or disoriented? At what points did they experience vocational opportunities that turned out to be more of a temptation than a true calling? How do these experiences mirror or contradict your own experiences?

Mentor

Reflection Journal #3 (October 6)

What formational experiences and communities have been critical to your mentor’s vocational journey? What provided the foundations on which their later vocational expressions were built? How is this similar and/or different from your experience?

Reflection Journal #4 (October 13)

How were the energies of your mentor recruited for something greater than herself? To whom or to what did he feel strongly called? How and when did this yearning get named or expressed? How is this similar and/or different from your experience?

Reflection Journal #6 (October 27)

When was the vocational trajectory or self-understanding of your mentor disrupted, challenged or disoriented? At what points did they experience vocational opportunities that turned out to be more of a temptation than a true calling? How do these experiences mirror or contradict your own experiences?  

 Both mentor and historical partner

Reflection Journal #7 (November 3)

Drawing on both your reading of your autobiography or spiritual memoir and your interviews with your mentor, respond to the following prompt in 3-4 thoughtful paragraphs:

Think about the times that your mentor and/or historical partner had a calling/vocational experience come to an end or change significantly. This may be a major shift in the kind of work or relationships they were called to be in, or a shift in their institutional location or the community in which they were located. How did they discern that a shift or ending was needed?  How did they negotiate these changes with the communities or institutions to which they were called? What can you learn from how they handled these experiences?

 Reflection Journal #8 (November 8)

1.     How have your mentor and historical partner sustained a sense of vocation in the midst of the sometimes harsh and demanding realities of their institutional and communal life and work? When the going got tough, how were they able to remember who they were called to be and why they were doing what they were doing? What concrete strategies and practices can you borrow from them to sustain a sense of vocation in the midst of the demands of your life?

OR

2.     What has your mentor and historical partner described as life-giving in their vocation? Why do they show up to do the work every day? What keeps them going? What concrete strategies and practices can you borrow from them to sustain a sense of vocation in the midst of the demands of your life? Based on what you have learned from your mentor and historical partner, what you are most looking forward to? 

 

 MDiv

 

 

IncompletesIncompletes are not permitted in this course.

Academic Integrity and Community Covenant:  All students are expected to abide by Iliff’s statement on Academic Integrity, as published in the Masters Student Handbook, or the Joint PhD Statement on Academic Honesty, as published in the Joint PhD Student Handbook, as appropriate.  All participants in this class are expected to be familiar with Iliff’s Community Covenant.

Accommodations:  Iliff engages in a collaborative effort with students with disabilities to reasonably accommodate student needs.   Students are encouraged to contact their assigned advisor to initiate the process of requesting accommodations.  The advising center can be contacted at advising@iliff.edu or by phone at 303-765-1146. 

Writing Lab:  Grammar and organization are important for all written assignments.  Additional help is available from the Iliff Writing Lab, which is available for students of any level who need help beginning an assignment, organizing thoughts, or reviewing a final draft. 

Inclusive Language:  It is expected that all course participants will use inclusive language in speaking and writing, and will use terms that do not create barriers to classroom community. 

DateDayDetails
Sep 08, 2014MonIntroductionsdue by 03:00PM
Sep 22, 2014MonReflection Journal #1due by 03:00PM
Sep 29, 2014MonReflection Journal #2due by 03:00PM
Oct 06, 2014MonReflection Journal #3due by 03:00PM
Oct 15, 2014WedReflection Journal #4due by 03:00PM
Oct 20, 2014MonReflection Journal #5due by 03:00PM
Oct 27, 2014MonReflection Journal #6due by 03:00PM
Nov 03, 2014MonReflection Journal #7due by 04:00PM
Nov 10, 2014MonReflection Journal #8due by 04:00PM
Nov 15, 2014SatFinal Projectdue by 01:00AM