Syllabus for Lilly Fellows Reflection Group

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Lilly Fellowship
FWRK 4850
Spring 2008

Meeting Times: Tuesdays at 6:30 (unless otherwise noted)
Meeting Place: Reuben's
Instructor: Raymond Clothier
Phone: 974-1470 (office)
Office: Murrah Annex 212
Email: clothrs@millsaps.edu

Course Description
Lilly Internships are an opportunity to connect academic learning to exploration of vital issues of meaning, purpose, vocation, and service. Building upon “The Meaning of Work” course, Lilly Internships add a professional workplace as an additional learning environment and offer a new framework for examining the connection between meaning and work. Lilly Internships offer opportunities for learning in at least three contexts: 1) work experience in a profession of interest, 2) a mentoring relationship with a professional who is interested in exploring issues of work and calling, and 3) a reflection group for making connections between coursework, internship experiences, and personal and vocational growth.

Lilly Fellowships are intended to attract a select group of students who have facility with the language of vocation and are committed to employing it to further their own exploration of calling and to take leadership in promoting and guiding reflection upon vocation with other Millsaps students. Lilly Fellows will also be challenged to apply ethical principles to the practice of a particular profession and to make connections between academic study, internship experience, and the ongoing development of a system of meaning that informs personal reflection and professional practice.

Course Objectives
The objectives of Lilly Internships are:

• Offer concrete experience in a profession of interest.
• Facilitate reflection upon previous and current experience as a guide to understanding vocation.
• Increase the number of partners in an ongoing conversation about vocation.

The objectives of the Lilly Fellows program are:

• To deepen reflection upon vocation by connecting ongoing experience and reflection with an underlying sense of meaning and purpose and examining its relation to one’s enduring values and commitments.
• To provide leadership on campus in the articulation and discussion of issues of vocation, meaning, and purpose.
• To deepen understanding of the ethical practice of a profession of interest.

Why read stories?
Discerning vocation is a life-long process that is more like the process of constructing a narrative than a search for something that can be discovered. It involves taking the data of your experience and constructing it into an intelligible narrative that answers vital questions such as: Who am I?, What ultimately matters?, What should I do?

When considering ethical questions of who we are responsible to and how we should act, I find that stories provide a rich context for exploring all of the variables. Most importantly, they engage the “moral imagination,” or the ability to understand a context, interrogate characters, and consider various possibilities for action. Sometimes the characters even come to be a part of our lives, familiar foils who give us lasting examples of lives lived and choices made as we deliberate our own.

Desired Outcomes:
Upon completion of the course, the Lilly Fellow will:

• Be familiar with the traditional categories of ethical theory.
• Be able to articulate the ethical standards and pitfalls of a particular profession.
• Be adept at understanding the complex motivations of characters who must make decisions with ethical ramifications.
• Be able to think broadly about their own context and the possibilities available to them when decisions of great import must be made.

Required Texts
Singer, Peter and Renata Singer, eds. The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), 2005.

Expectations/Requirements*
Internship Hours (pass or fail)
All Lilly Fellows are expected to complete 120 hours at the internship site. Fellows are expected to keep track of their hours. A timesheet will be due on February 20th and may be asked for later as needed.
Timesheet due: February 11th (the day class meets that week)

Reflection Group (10%)
To use the previous Lilly Internship as material for shared learning, and to develop the ability to guide other students in reflection upon vocation, Lilly Fellows will be serving as guides for Lilly Interns and meeting separately in a reflection group. A daily schedule is below.

Responsibilities for Guiding Reflection on Vocation
Serving as a Guide for a Lilly Intern (10%). Each Lilly Fellow will meet with a Lilly Intern at the first meeting of the Lilly Interns Reflection Group and lead at least one discussion during the semester.

Conversations with a Lilly Intern (10%)
Throughout the semester, you will be conversing with your Lilly Intern(s). You will initiative conversation with your intern(s) about the internship six times during the semester. E-mail exchanges should be substantive (400-500 words) or face to face meetings should last about a half an hour. Copy e-mail exchanges to Raymond or make a brief report of the conversation by e-mail.

Leadership Project (10%)
In addition, each Lilly Fellow will have specific assigned responsibilities for promoting and guiding reflection on vocation with Millsaps students. This is intended to be an opportunity for Lilly Fellows to

• develop and exercise leadership abilities,
• explore how vocation is lived out,
• and extend the discussion of vocation to the campus community.

You’ve thought about vocation. Why does it matter? How has it changed your perspective? How do you see it connecting to real life? How can you help others think about what it might mean for them? This is your chance to take the initiative and make something worthwhile happen! Resources are available and you are invited to think as big you can. The projects are generally expected to be a commitment of around 10 hours, and examples of previous leadership projects include hosting an event or bringing in a speaker, planning an Immersion trip, serving as a Fellow to a Service-Learning course, writing articles or helping to create a newsletter, and assisting with the CALLS program.
Fellows will be expected to meet with the Associate Director to discuss various possibilities and to write a brief proposal for their responsibilities for guiding reflection on vocation this semester.

Due: Friday, February 8th

Possible leadership responsibilities:

1. Organizing a campus program on the subject of vocation. If you would like, you may even choose to invite a guest speaker for an event in a later semester.
2. Planning immersion trips.
3. Helping to coordinate the logistics of a service-learning course.
4. Taking leadership in another program of the Faith & Work Initiative like C.A.L.L.S. or sophomore advising retreats.
5. Writing articles or working on the newsletter.

Mentor and Self-Evaluation (25%)
An evaluation will be completed at the mid-term and end of the semester. This evaluation will be both quantitative and qualitative. Specific guidelines will be offered at a later date.

Weekly Writings (20%)
Each week, you will turn in a two-page paper engaging the readings for the week.

Final Assignment (20%)
Picking up on the final assignment from your Lilly Internship, it is now 20 years after your graduation and you are firmly ensconced in your profession. Write a story about an ethical challenge that you face in your life as it relates to your work. What has come into conflict? Is your employer expecting you to do something that violates your ethics? Are the demands of your work impinging upon your life or vice versa? Is the field going in a direction that is contrary to your reasons for entering the practice of the profession? Is the organization you work for treating you and other employees in ways that diminish their ethical reasoning? Are global market forces exerting pressures that compromise the full humanity of workers?

Please write fiction in the first or third person. In other words, don’t write a description (I imagine I’ll be working in. . .), write a story (I sit in traffic watching crows circle overhead. . .). Above all, have fun with it!

5 pages

Evaluation
The instructor will award the grade for this course based upon an evaluation of the quality of on-site work and vocational exploration in the internship site that will be completed by you and your Mentor, combined with an evaluation of participation and quality of work in the Reflection Group.

The Millsaps Honor Code
All work completed in this course should comply with the letter and the spirit of the Millsaps Honor Code. Suspected violations of the Code will be forwarded to the Honor Council for consideration.

If at any point in the semester you or anyone you know has questions about the Code or its relation to a given assignment, please do not hesitate to contact the instructor. Ignorance and the absence of malice are not acceptable excuses for violating the Honor Code.

For a fuller explanation of the Code, see here.

Disability Disclosure
If you have special needs related to a learning disability, please see me.

Daily Schedule*

Tuesday, January 29th at 6:30

• Story to discuss: “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, pg. 492 in Leading Lives That Matter.
• Weekly writing: In a two to three page paper, try to enter the mindset of one of the characters in the story and reflect on the ethical choices available and the possible consequences that can be foreseen.

Tuesday, February 5th at 6:00 in AC 215

Dunbar Lecture: The topic will be whether or not evolutionary theory can explain human morality, which is the claim of quite a few recent books and papers. The speaker will be Michael Ruse of Florida State University, an internationally recognized expert on the history, philosophy, and social impact of evolutionary theory. His talk will be: Can Evolution Explain Morality? Or is it Dog eat Dog all the Way Down?

Tuesday, February 12th at 6:30

• Chapter 1 and 2 from Ethics: Theory and Practice (handout).
• Story to discuss: “A Father’s Story” (handout).
• Weekly writing: In a two to three page paper, change one critical detail about the context, characters, or action of the story and play out how this changes what happens.

Tuesday, February 19th at 6:30

• Read the preface to The Moral of the Story on pg. ix and the Introduction to section I on pg. 3.
• Stories to discuss:
  • Wolfe, Tom, excerpt from The Bonfire of the Vanities, pg. 26 in The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), 2005.
  • Eliot, George, excerpt from Middlemarch, pg. 34 in The Moral of the Story.
• Weekly writing: Using the “Issues” section in the back of the book, write out three questions that you will pose to the group and your responses. What questions does the story raise for you? How do you go about answering those questions? Have you come to any answers? Does it help you derive any notions about how you should live?

Tuesday, February 26th at 6:30

• Panel of Lilly Fellow alums at Real Life 101 (4:30 – 6:30 in Sullivan Harrell) speaking about surviving the first year out of college and trying to keep vocation in view.

Wednesday, March 5th at 6:30

• Stories to discuss:
• Introduction to section II on pg. 51.
• Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “The Unnatural Mother”, pg. 57 in The Moral of the Story.
• Dickens, Charles, excerpt from Bleak House, pg. 63 in The Moral of the Story.
• Weekly writing: Go beyond what is written in the stories to do a study of one of the characters (2-3 pages). Why does this person act in the way they act? What do they value that causes them to act in this way? How do they manage to deviate so dramatically from their social context?

Wednesday, March 12th at 6:30

• Stories to discuss:
  • Introduction to section V on pg. 211.
  • Gaskell, Elizabeth, excerpt from North and South, pg. 215 in The Moral of the Story.
  • Seaver, Edwin, excerpt from The Company, pg. 222 in The Moral of the Story.
  • Ozeki, Ruth, excerpt from My Year of Meats, pg. 225 in The Moral of the Story.
• Weekly writing: Using the “Issues” section in the back of the book, write out three questions that you will pose to the group and your responses. What questions does the story raise for you? How do you go about answering those questions? Have you come to any answers? Does it help you derive any notions about how you should live?

Tuesday, March 25th at 6:30

• Stories to discuss
  • Ibsen, Henrik, excerpt from An Enemy of the People, pg. 233 in The Moral of the Story.
  • Snow, C.P., excerpt from The Search, pg. 241 in The Moral of the Story.
• Weekly writing: Choose between reflecting from the mindset of one of the characters and engaging questions from the reading (2-3 pgs.).

Tuesday, April 1st at 6:30

• Stories to discuss
  • Introduction to section XIII on pg. 461.
  • Johnson, E. Pauline, “The Sea-Serpent”, pg. 465 in The Moral of the Story.
  • Twain, Mark, excerpt from Huckleberry Finn, pg. 466 in The Moral of the Story.
  • Greene, Graham, excerpt from The Third Man in The Moral of the Story.
• Weekly writing: Using the “Issues” section in the back of the book, write out three questions that you will pose to the group and your responses. What questions does the story raise for you? How do you go about answering those questions? Have you come to any answers? Does it help you derive any notions about how you should live?

Tuesday, April 8th at 6:30

• Stories to discuss:
  • Introduction to section XIV starting on pg. 493.
  • Le Guin, Ursula, excerpt from “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, pg. 497 in The Moral of the Story.
  • James, Henry, excerpt from The Portrait of a Lady, pg. 552 in The Moral of the Story.
• Weekly writing: In a two to three page paper, change one critical detail about the context, characters, or action of the story and play out how this changes what happens. Do the consequences of the action determine whether or not it was right, or are some things always wrong?

Final Paper due on Wednesday, April 30th for Seniors and Friday, May 2nd for everyone else.

* Assignments are subject to change at the instructor’s discretion.