Lilly Faculty Seminar at Sewanee 2005
The Lilly grant had a unique impact on faculty with the Lilly Faculty Seminar, which met from May 23 to May 27, 2005 . The focus of this first-of-its-kind seminar was the vocational lives of faculty. Meeting with facilitators, 12 participants visited their own stories, looking at how and when they decided to engage teaching, as well as what kept them in that calling. The facilitator for this seminar was Professor John Shelley of the Religion faculty of Furman University, Greenville, SC. Readings from selections by Don Browning, Stephanie Paulsell and Mark Schwehn examined the place of vocational awareness in the teaching life and the formation of curriculum.
The inspiration for this program was the understood need for faculty to have their own place for reflection, apart from the demanding business of the academic year. Visiting Lilly Fellow Gregory Jones (Fall 2003) invited faculty and staff at Sewanee to “visit the margins of their lives” – to look at questions and concerns that preoccupations with teaching and administration make it convenient to avoid. Jones invited faculty to step into the “creative tension that can help us to negotiate, narrate, and discern more faithfully the intersection of our loyalties to institutions, communities, and to our own integrity.” As the Lilly Endowment and the Fund for Theological Education has shown with other schools, the cultivation of a vocational sense among faculty provides a strengthening of connections both with the educational mission of institutions, as well as with an original sense of purpose that motivates those who teach in colleges and universities.Facilitators