Faculty/Staff Retreat

Faculty and staff retreats and campus-wide events reinforce our core curriculum emphasis on vocation and "curriculum as formation." Vocation-focused retreats help increasingly disparate faculty members and departments understand, commit to, and carry out the college mission.

The Lilly Vocation Project includes funds for faculty and staff development retreats on vocation. These retreats serve a dual purpose: they help Calvin faculty and staff focus on their own callings as part of an academic community; and they help them consider how best to lead students to consider their callings. Calvin is deeply committed to equipping the entire faculty with knowledge and strategies to address vocation-especially given requirements that every first-year student take Prelude and Developing a Christian Mind, and all take an upper-level integrative seminar. The retreat programs offers support for faculty to include vocation questions and topics in the classroom and laboratory, and in advising and mentoring students.

Faculty and Staff Retreats
The Lilly Vocation Project cross-divisional team chooses some topics for faculty and staff retreats and campus vocation events. Each year they give priority to incorporating topics and expertise of the Lilly Faculty Scholars. Sample retreat themes include:

Creating a hunger for vocation in the first-year student.
Changing focus and the challenge of transition in students' senior year.
What do sophomore students need?
Using the stories of your discipline to explore virtue.
Teaching toward virtue: Are our students watching us?
What does the ministry of reconciliation mean in college living and learning?
Teaching honors students.
Navigating the tension between preparation for career vs. preparation for life.
How do the metaphors used by an academic discipline shape the commitments of students?
How do gender dynamics influence calling?
How can cross cultural engagement turn exposure into commitment?

In addition groups of faculty, departmental or otherwise associated, may apply for Lilly funding of a vocation-themed retreat for faculty exploration of vocation.

Application Form

Contact Shirley Roels, Director, Lilly Vocation Project
roel at calvin.edu 616-526-6557