What does it mean to live a meaningful life? How do students discover their sense of purpose, and how can faculty guide them?
Bryn Mawr College will pursue these questions through two new grants: an award from the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) and a 2025 NetVUE Professional Development Grant. Together, these projects reflect Bryn Mawr’s longstanding mission to educate students for lives of purpose and our commitment to equipping both faculty and students with the tools to reflect on vocation, values, and character.
The ECI-funded project, “Teaching and Learning Character Together: A Partnership Approach to Preparing Students for Lives of Purpose,” is a three-year initiative led by Professor of Education Alison Cook-Sather and Professor of Political Science Joel Schlosser, with Jennefer Callaghan, director of the Emily Balch Seminar Program. This project will support faculty in developing ways to more intentionally embed the virtues of respect, open-mindedness, and courage in the curriculum, beginning with the Emily Balch Seminars (ESEMs), Bryn Mawr’s required first-year seminar, and other introductory courses.
Participating faculty will attend half-semester seminars modeled on the faculty pedagogy seminars offered through the Teaching and Learning Institute and linked with the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program. These seminars will take place while instructors are teaching ESEMs or introductory courses, giving them the opportunity to integrate respect, open-mindedness, and courage more intentionally into their teaching.
“The aim of these seminars is to give faculty the time and space to reflect while they are teaching,” says Schlosser. “This model supports faculty in becoming more reflective practitioners, who can adjust to challenges like political events or new technologies rather than being wedded to a particular approach or game plan.”
Self-reflection, ongoing dialogue with others, and adjustment of one’s approach are key components of developing virtues like courage, open-mindedness, and respect, he adds. “Our seminars will model how to pursue a purposeful life in form as well as content.”
After participating in the seminars, faculty will also have an opportunity to participate in pedagogy circles, small groups co-led by undergraduate SaLT consultants, to further reflect on their experiences and refine their approaches. Over three years, the project will engage up to 120 faculty and reach more than 2,600 students, while also creating resources and evaluation tools to ensure the work continues beyond the grant period. This includes making the strategies for nurturing courage, open-mindedness, and respect more explicit in the New Faculty Pedagogy Seminar, offered every fall for new continuing faculty, as well as in the support structures and materials offered to ESEM instructors and available to all chairs of departments for their introductory course offerings.
“In the conversations we had in crafting our ECI proposal, we realized how the TLI and SaLT program and the ESEM program already foster courage, open-mindedness, and respect, but could do so more explicitly and in partnership with one another,” says Cook-Sather.
During the project’s design, the team decided to focus on providing support structures for reflection and dialogue so that instructors can craft their own understandings of courage, open-mindedness, and respect and develop varied ways of fostering these in students.
"Our goal is to make discovering a sense of purpose and living a meaningful life more intentional–and affirming–processes for faculty and students alike,” says Cook-Sather.
The NetVUE Professional Development Grant supports a one-year faculty seminar series titled “Vocation Exploration: What is a Life of Meaning, and Can We Teach It?” Led by Associate Professor Bethany Schneider, chair of Literatures in English, the project will bring together 30 faculty and staff from across disciplines to reflect on their own vocational journeys and consider how they might help students do the same.
The first seminar session will invite faculty to reflect on their own vocational journeys through exploratory writing exercises, looking back to who they were as students and how their lives have taken shape since. The second will draw on classroom moments when students have raised “big questions” about meaning, purpose, or fulfillment during academic discussion. The final session will be forward-looking, asking participants to brainstorm ways of teaching their discipline that open questions of vocation and calling for their students.
"'Vocation” is a word that is either under- or over-defined. We mostly use it as a synonym for ‘job,’ which is a weak definition. But when we think about its meaning more closely, we quickly remember that it is deeply rooted in Christian thought,” says Schneider. "It comes from the Latin for ‘call’ and it can be as sweet as the Quakers’ notion of 'the still small voice,' or reach the Jonah-like intensity of the imperative that you either answer God’s call to a life of faith or be eaten by a whale.”
Participants in the project won’t think about vocation in terms of divine voices, says Schneider, but they also won’t be thinking about vocation and calling in terms of profession.
“I hope that we will be able to think together about how to reinvent for our students and ourselves the idea of being called to become yourself—called to live a life of meaning—outside of both religious discourse and achievement-driven professional discourse,” says Schneider.
“Of course, we all hope that our students will be professionally successful, and preparing them for the ‘real world’ is absolutely our job,” she adds. “But the ‘real world’ also includes modes of being happy, fulfilled, and invested in community. Perhaps we can use the idea of vocation to begin to imagine ways to teach those commitments from the hearts of our disciplines, alongside other ‘skills.’
The program will culminate in a capstone event where faculty and students discuss how different disciplines grapple with purpose and meaning. In the long term, the project will also lay the groundwork for alumnae/i partnerships that bring graduates’ vocational stories into the classroom.
Together, these two initiatives advance Bryn Mawr’s mission of preparing students for lives of purpose by equipping both faculty and students to reflect more deeply on meaning, values, and character.
“These grants affirm Bryn Mawr’s commitment to educating not just for academic or professional achievement, but also for meaning, purpose, and integrity,” says President Wendy Cadge. “Our students are eager to connect what they learn in the classroom and on campus with the lives they want to build. By supporting faculty in bringing questions of vocation and character into teaching, these initiatives will help ensure that every Mawrter has the opportunity to reflect deeply on who they are, what they value, and how they want to live in the world.”
A broad team across the College supports these efforts. For the ECI grant, Professors Cook-Sather and Schlosser serve as co-principal investigators. They’ll be working with Jennefer Callaghan, Director of the Emily Balch Seminar Program, program facilitator Kelly Gavin Zuckerman, and undergraduate SaLT student partners. The NetVUE project is led by Associate Professor Bethany Schneider, with oversight from President Wendy Cadge and collaboration from Katie Krimmel, Dean of the Career and Civic Engagement Center. David Consiglio, Director of Assessment, Learning Spaces, and Special Projects, will serve as an external evaluator on both projects.