PeakExperiences in Personal Stories of Calling Among University Professors

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Peak-Experiences in Personal Stories of
CallingAmong University Professors

• Don Thompson and Cindy Miller-Perrin
• Pepperdine University
• Faith, Hope, and Work Conference
• February 10, 2006
• Pt. Loma Nazarene University

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Presentation Overview

• We will describe the methods used to obtain
  vocational autobiographies from faculty members,
  including preparatory reading material and
  writing prompts.
• We will describe the content analysis of the
  faculty autobiographies, focusing on the
  peak-pivotal-experiences in their lives that
  shaped and clarified their vocational paths.
• Finally, we will discuss gender differences
  experienced by these faculty in discerning and
  living out vocation.

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Purpose of the Study

• To examine peak-experiences of vocational
  discernment and action among university
  professors through evaluation of self-reflective
  writing.

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Research Methodology

• Frederick Buechner states in the Alphabet of
  Grace that most theology is essentially
  autobiography.
• Our method is based on a content analysis of
  vocational autobiographies written by over 90
  faculty members from two Christian universities.

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Faculty Sample

• Faculty were recruited from
• Faith and Learning Seminars
• Faith and Vocation Workshop
• 92 faculty completed autobiographies
• Response rates range from 65-84

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Demographic Characteristics of the Sample

• Mean Age 40 years
• Gender 43 Female
• 57 Male
• Marital Status 16 Single
• 81 Married
• Race/Ethnicity 7 African
  American
• 7 Asian
• 79 Caucasian
• Religious Affiliation 21 Catholic
• 78 Protestant
• 1 Jewish

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Vocation Readings

• Thompson, D., Miller-Perrin, C. (2003).
  Understanding vocation Discerning and
  responding to God's call. Leaven, 11, 48-53.
• Farnham, S. G., Gill, J. P., McLean, R. T.,
  Ward, S. M. (1991). Listening hearts Discerning
  call in community. Harrisburg, PA Morehouse
  Publishing.
• Palmer, P. J. (2000). Let your life speak
  Listening for the voice of vocation. San
  Francisco Jossey-Bass, Inc.
• Himes, M. (1995). Doing the truth in love
  Conversations about God, relationships, and
  service. Mahwah, New Jersey Paulist Press.
• Rayburn, C. (1997). Vocation as calling
  Affirmative response or "wrong number". In D.P.
  Bloch L.J. Richmond (Eds.), Connections between
  spirit and work in career development (pp.
  163-183). Palo Alto, CA Davies-Black Publishing.
• Buechner, F. (1969). The hungering dark. (pp.
  25-33). New York Harper Row Publishers.
• Parks, S. D. (2000). Big questions, worthy
  Dreams. San Francisco, CA Jossey-Bass Inc.

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Vocational Autobiography Prompts - Past
Reflections

• Reflect on your past and how you have become who
  you are
• Describe major turning points along your
  vocational journey.
• Discuss moments of crisis or confusion as well as
  moments of joy and clarity along your past
  vocational journey (e.g., experiences that have
  affirmed or shaken your sense of calling).
• Write about friends or mentors who have
  contributed to your vocational development.
• Include distractions, tensions, or barriers that
  have hindered the pursuit of your vocational
  calling.

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Vocational Autobiography Prompts Present
Reflections

• Focus on your present calling and your role as a
  mentor to students
• Describe evidence you have that you are living
  your call now.
• Explain how you practice ongoing discernment to
  your call.
• Identify what you do to mentor /or facilitate a
  sense of vocation in your students.

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Maslows Account of the Locus of Peak-Experience

• The sacred is in the ordinary, that is, it is to
  be found in ones daily life, in ones neighbors,
  friends, and family, in ones back yard.
• Experiences occur through
• Life Events
• Interactions with others
• Mentors or Protégés
• Friendships
• Community

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Peak-Experiences Described in Faculty Essays

• Turning Points
• Mentoring
• As Protégés
• As Mentors
• Barriers and Obstacles
• Gender Specific Findings

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Maslows Account of Peak-Experiences as Turning
Points

• Revelations, mystical illuminations, ecstasies or
  transcendent experiences
• Peak-experiences are individual, resulting in
• Personal change
• Feeling sacred
• Personal heaven
• Movement toward a perfect identity

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Turning PointsLiterature

• At each transition of life we wrestle with
  fundamental matters of faith. As young adults we
  choose a faith of our own to give purpose and
  direction to our lives. In midlife we trust God
  with the character and meaning of our lives when
  we are not all that we hoped we would be we
  learn to trust God in the midst of our
  limitations. In our senior years we find that
  the only way we can let go is through a
  fundamental faith in God, a God who is bigger
  than our work, our career and our ministry. -
  Gordon Smith, Courage and Calling

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Turning Points Discussion

• Have you had any peak-experiences that have
  contributed to the realization of your own
  calling?

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Turning Points - Events

• Death of family member or close friend
• Lifes mistakes wrong turns
• Education
• Accepting Jesus
• Conflict, tension, growing pains
• Responding to suffering in the world
• Parenting

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Turning Points Outcomes

• Feeling as though nothing else matters
• Sensing spiritual growth
• Experiencing a deep sense of joy, satisfaction,
  contentment, peace, excitement, renewed energy
• Receiving positive feedback from others
• Receiving answers to prayer

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Turning PointsEssay Responses

• All of my science courses seemed like work all
  the literature courses seemed like play. On
  Thanksgiving holiday, I had to work through some
  heavy-duty equilibrium problems for my
  quantitative analysis chemistry course, and I was
  to read Thornton Wilders Our Town for my
  American literature course. The power of the
  play overwhelmed me. I didnt know it then, but
  I was feeling the difference between what Thomas
  De Quincey called the literature of knowledge and
  the literature of power. And I began to think,
  Something is wrong here. Why am I competent in
  but so unmoved by my major, and why do plays and
  stories and novels and poems move me so?

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Turning PointsEssay Responses

• I had a dream that I was walking through a snowy
  wood with sparse, straggly trees. I came to a
  small clearing, occupied by a concentration camp.
  A few ramshackle wooden buildings with barbed
  wire strung around them... I knew that my job was
  to sneak in and rescue the people imprisoned
  there. I went in and brought a person out on my
  back. We were trudging away toward safety when I
  heard voices and then dogs closing on us... I
  kept going, but in exhaustion I let that person
  slide off my back and just kept trudging forward.
  They wanted the prisoner, not me. Now I was
  alone and in despair, trudging across one snowy
  hillock and then another under a featureless gray
  sky, no sense of where I was going, just alone
  with the depth of my failure and despair.
• Then I crossed the crest of one hillock and
  found not another valley and hillock, but a scene
  of grandeur set before me on an impossibly vast
  scale. I looked out and away at a turbulent gray
  sea crashing against a rocky coast and knew that
  those waves and boulders were in fact on the
  scale of mountains and the vista extended out not
  just as far as I could see but far beyond. I was
  immediately shocked by the awe, delight, and
  gratitude that first displaced my despair and
  then settled into an awareness, that I was very
  smallnot necessarily insignificant, but
  definitely very, very smallthat things were
  going on in the world on a scale that I could
  hardly imagine and never know. The dream settled
  the lord and disciple matter, letting me know
  that I would be needing not just a lord, but a
  savior. The work is Gods. If I get to
  participate in it in some way, thats great. But
  the work is Gods.

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Turning PointsEssay Responses

• I was watching the news when a disturbing story
  came on. In England, two young boys had
  kidnapped a toddler and killed him. I couldnt
  get over that event. After hearing that story, I
  began to wonder what would cause someone,
  particularly children to do such a horrific
  thing. At that point I changed my major to
  psychology, transferred to a different school,
  with a better psychology program, and focused on
  understanding child development.

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Maslows Account of Peak-Experiences through
Mentoring

• Basic human needs can be fulfilled only by and
  through other human beings, i.e. society. Thus,
  the need for community, belongingness, and
  contact with others.
• The best way to become a better helper is to
  become a better person. But one necessary aspect
  of becoming a better person is via helping other
  people. One must do both simultaneously.

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Mentoring Literature

• Recognition of their Protégés
• Support
• Challenge
• Inspiration
• Dialogue
• Mutual Attraction Toward Similar Aims
• Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams

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Mentoring Literature

• The power of our mentors is not necessarily in
  the models of good teaching they gave us ...
  Their power is in their capacity to awaken a
  truth within us, a truth we can reclaim years
  later by recalling their impact on our lives. -
  Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak Listening for
  the Voice of Vocation
• In academic culture most listening is critical
  listening. We tend to pay attention only long
  enough to develop a counterargument we critique
  the students or the colleagues ideas we
  mentally grade and pigeonhole each other. In
  society at large, people often listen with an
  agenda, to sell or petition or seduce. Seldom is
  there a deep, openhearted, non-judging reception
  of the other. And so we all talk louder and more
  stridently and with a terrible desperation. By
  contrast, if someone truly listens to me, my
  spirit begins to expand. - Mary Rose OReilley,
  Radical Presence Teaching as Contemplative
  Practice

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Mentoring - ProtégéDiscussion

• Was there a person who, as a mentor, contributed
  to your vocational development?

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Mentoring Protégé Themes

• From teachers, professors colleagues
• Through scripture inspirational writing
• Via spouses, parents, family members, church
  family friends

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Mentoring ProtégéEssay Responses

• Throughout my life, my grandmother wrote several
  letters to me. In almost every one she included
  the following verse, from II Timothy 220 In a
  large house there are not only articles of gold
  and silver, but also of wood and clay some are
  for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the
  Master and prepared to do any good work. This
  advice gave me a sense that I was called by God
  to do important things.

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Mentoring ProtégéEssay Responses

• One of my professors encouraged me to pursue
  graduate school. He even went so far as to sign
  out a school car, make appointments for me with
  faculty, and drive me to the university to
  consider its program in human development. He
  encouraged me to consider teaching at the
  university level and helped me find my first
  academic post.

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Mentoring Mentor Themes

• Encourage, serve, support, lead, nudge, excite,
  energize, hear, listen, share inner lives
• Understand vocation as journey
• Find where deep gladness meets deep hunger
• Learn about self, giftedness, passions, life
  purpose
• Help students navigate faith integration
• Build and foster courage

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Mentoring MentorEssay Responses

• I need to listen to my students. I need to hear
  what they are hearing. I need to be able to take
  their perspective as I decide what and when to
  share my own vocational journey. Perhaps it is
  enough that they fully grasp that vocation is a
  journey they dont have to understand it or be
  able to articulate their own vocation. They just
  need to accept that if they listen they will
  eventually find as Buechner says where their
  deep gladness meets the worlds deep hunger.

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Maslows Account of Peak-Experiences as
Barriers/Obstacles

• Besides peak-experiences, Maslow mentions so
  called plateau-experiences but omits discussion
  of struggles, barriers, or obstacles. These
  valley-experiences do occur frequently in our
  essays as contributing to vocational discernment
  and action.

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Barriers/Obstacles Literature

• Personal Values, Beliefs, and Emotions
• Secular views of vocation, fear
• Cultural Values
• Material success, competition, productivity
• Personal and Psychological Needs
• Security, control, certainty, power
• Social and Interpersonal Circumstances
• Finances, family responsibilities, stereotypes
• (Farnham et al., 1991 Rayburn, 1997 Thompson
  Miller-Perrin, 2003)

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Barriers/Obstacles

• Various obstacles or barriers may interfere with
  our ability to discern or act upon our vocational
  callings.
• Barriers serve as challenges that either
• create struggles that we must overcome
• create an impasse that redirects our journey

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Barriers/Obstacles Discussion Question

• Have you experienced any barriers/obstacles to
  pursuing your calling?

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Barriers/Obstacles - Themes

• Pride, self-centeredness, prejudice
• Lack of faith, lack of self-confidence
• Struggle with traditional gender roles
• Balance between home and profession
• Health setbacks
• Family conflict, divorce, remarriage
• Church culture

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Barriers/Obstacles to Vocational ActionEssay
Responses

• My first semester was painful. Straight out of
  graduate school, I embraced my students excited
  and ready to embark on an intellectual journey.
  I found, however, that my students responded to
  my enthusiasm with indifference, sleepiness, and
  even hostility. I was also disheartened to see
  racial tensions and divisions in and outside of
  my class with minority students coming to me to
  say that they felt depressed and alienated on
  campus. I felt that I had to be an entertainer
  instead of a teacher and a radical social
  activist instead of a private and objective
  researcher.

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Barriers/Obstacles to Vocational ActionEssay
Responses

• My biggest enemy is me. I have learned that the
  hand of God is real. The voice that woke me up
  and filled my heart with joy when I was 9 still
  rings in my ears. The toughest challenges and the
  steepest hills I had taken on have only been
  conquered when I dont doubt my creator, that He
  is with me. Through trials and troubles, I have
  learned how much my life is His. It is only when
  I doubt Him that I weaken. I am glad I have lived
  through these trials because without them, I
  would not be as strong as I am today. There are
  many people in the world who live in the light of
  God. They may not be strong or wealthy or
  schooled. They just are. To those people I take
  off my hat and bow as I recognize that they are
  in this journey with me. It is when I lack
  humility that I invite doubt and weakness. As I
  look ahead, I can see that the road is not all
  flat, but certainly if there are obstacles ahead
  I will be able to overcome them because I am not
  alone. I never have been.

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Barriers/Obstacles to Vocational ActionEssay
Responses

• Our home was no Norman Rockwell tableau. I
  recall silence, tension, and hurt. My parents
  were too often angry and frustrated, especially
  with each other. All was not well between my
  parents, though I never doubted their love for
  each other. My father was the product of a
  troubled marriage. His parents divorced when he
  was a young man. His father was a harsh, even a
  brutal taskmaster, and my dad had suffered
  beatings at his hand. The residual anger and hurt
  went deep. Add to that the financial worries, and
  you have the makings of an unhappy household. I,
  the second oldest, grew up worrying about
  everything and everybody. Somehow, I adopted the
  role of the family fixer. It wasnt a proper
  role (I was doomed to failure), but I cared a lot
  and wanted everything to be all right. I also
  wanted a relationship with my father, but it just
  seemed impossible. I felt things, I had questions
  and needs and dreams, but there was no one to
  share them with. Mom and dad were consumed with
  survival. There was no space for quiet,
  one-on-one conversations. It never occurred to
  them to have a personal, extended conversation
  with me. In fact, my first real conversation with
  my father came when I was thirty.

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Gender and Barriers/ObstaclesLiterature

• The topic of gender differences in vocational
  calling has not been examined empirically.
• Research in the areas of faith and identity
  development suggests the potential impact of
  gender on vocational development.
• (Das Harries, 1996 Pastorino, Dunham, Kidwell,
  Bacho, Lamborn, 1997)

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Gender Specific Themes

• Women were more likely than males to describe the
  presence of barriers/obstacles in their
  vocational pursuits.
• Women reported the following interpersonal,
  environmental, and social circumstances as
  interferring with their ability to pursue their
  vocations
• Views/opinions of others (e.g., parent, teacher
  or professor)
• Gender discrimination
• Pressure/desire to get married
• Raising children
• Traditions of church

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Gender Specific Barriers/Obstacles Essay
Responses

• While it may be best that I didnt end up a
  youth minister, realizing that I was limited
  because of my sex was deeply disconcerting and
  left me a bit confused as to where God was
  leading me. In fact, I recall thinking that God
  only called men to positions of ministry and so I
  resigned myself to that reality.

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Gender Specific Barriers/ObstaclesEssay Responses

• The culture of my church indicates that women
  should stay home with their children and tend to
  the family. In spite of this there are many
  women who work outside of the home at my church,
  but I would not be surprised that many, if not
  all of us feel guilty. I have attempted on three
  separate occasions to leave my professional
  positions to be a stay at home mom, but in
  every instance I was home for a little more than
  a year and I would return to work part-time and
  then eventually full time. This struggle has
  greatly clouded my search for vocation.

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Conclusions

• Mentors play an important role in the process of
  vocational discernment.
• Turning points play a key role in shaping ones
  vocational journey.
• A significant number of faculty reported
  experiencing barriers to living out their
  calling.
• Barriers manifest differently for men versus
  women.

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Conclusions

• The process of reflecting on ones vocational
  journey is self-validating and offers its own
  intrinsic value.
• The process of discussing ones vocational
  autobiography builds community and serves as a
  source of encouragement to others.

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Community Building

• I really did enjoy the evening and was
  encouraged in my faith and my calling from
  listening to the others.  These small group
  meetings to share and study issues related to
  vocation have done more tofoster camaraderie
  than any other activity I have participated in as
  a faculty member.  Thanks for making it possible.

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Touching Heaven, Touching Others

• This past spring I asked my students in one of
  my classes to write their own vocational journey
  as an introductory paper. On our first day of
  class, I closed the session by reading my
  Vocational Journey paper from last summer. In the
  paper, I discussed several personal and
  professional challenges that I have shared with
  few people. I felt vulnerable sharing such a
  personal reflection, but was hopeful that it
  would be a catalyst for further sharing by the
  students. When I finished reading the paper, the
  students didnt say much and we moved on to
  closing items and the class ended. Since we only
  met once a week, by the next class meeting the
  topic had moved on and we never discussed my
  paper. While the class became very close, I often
  wondered what the students thought of the paper
  and if perhaps it had made them uncomfortable.
  However, when I read the final class papers and
  my teacher evaluations I was surprised and
  humbled at the number of students who wrote
  extensively about the impact my sharing so openly
  had on them. I was stretched and I think they
  were stretched as well which was ultimately very
  gratifying.