Facilitated by the Career Center and the Center for Digital Innovation in Learning, this working group aims to support faculty in integrating vocational discernment, career readiness skill-building, and formation into innovative class assignments, offering students a deeper understanding of how their classroom learning directly relates to their lives and futures. 

It will run through the 2023-2024 academic year. 

Format

As a participant in this group, you will be supported in developing innovative classroom projects and assessments that will guide students in discerning and integrating academic content knowledge, career readiness and skill-building, and personal values and interests. We hope that the work in this group will directly impact the culture of your department with regard to making explicit for students the connections between learning inside the classroom and their post-graduate lives.

The working group will meet roughly once per month over lunch and faculty participants will each receive a stipend for their involvement. 

Rationale

The Boston College liberal arts experience is uniquely positioned to help students engage with a rapidly changing world in a way that’s guided by both their intellect and their values. As we have experienced, the recent release of Open AI’s Chat GPT has accelerated and made urgent discussions about how to integrate new technologies and new ways of working into the classroom. As well, in this technology-driven society, the value of a liberal arts education has come under increasing scrutiny as students seek economic security and ‘future-proof’ learning. In other words, while students come to college to learn, they are also thinking about how their learning translates to a post-college career. 

While this new era increases the importance of the ways of thinking and understanding the world that a liberal arts education provides, students often don’t see the connection between their learning in the classroom and their future lives and career path. With this working group, BC’s Career Center and Center for Digital Innovation in Learning (CDIL) invite faculty to navigate and respond to this challenge with guidance, space, and support. 

Furthermore, because students arrive at Boston College with differing levels of career exposure and knowledge, and because data shows that students from more marginalized backgrounds are less likely to proactively seek career services on their own, integrating career discernment and preparation into the academic experience is a critical ingredient to equitable student success. 

Guiding Questions

Faculty will be asked to consider such questions as:

• What are the particular ways students learn in my class and in my academic discipline?
• How can my class help students reflect on both their learning and their lives?
• How do students build skills in my class and my academic discipline that translate to other environments, including their careers?
• How can I develop activities in my class that translate to other environments, including their careers?
• How does my class experience play a role in identity formation and career discernment? 
• How can I weave the Jesuit Pedagogical focus on attention, reflection, and action into my course and daily classroom activities?
• How can we develop an ethical orientation to our use of digital technology in the classroom?
• What are the experiences that students bring with them to my class that can enhance the overall learning experience? 

This project is a partnership between the Boston College Career Center, which is situated within the Division of Student Affairs, and the Center for Digital Innovation in Learning, a department under the Office of the Provost.