Abstract

Chapter 5 presents three very different examples one of the PTEV’s key strengths: the ability to foster communities of learning around vocational themes. The largely first-generation students at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, were drawn into deeper engagement with their own quest for purpose and a meaningful future by entering into service among communities of recent immigrants, making personal connections while learning to understand these experiences within a larger historical and religious perspective. At Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the PTEV was able to creatively adapt the Jesuit tradition of self-examination and awareness to form learning communities among faculty and staff that deepened their participants’ commitment to their common educational mission. This trajectory of revitalizing tradition to enhance educational mission converged with the parallel PTEV developments at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, that drew on Protestant traditions to develop a learning community among new and continuing faculty and staff that was focused on their common calling as educators.