Thirty months after the world abruptly stopped to grapple with COVID-19, the mechanisms of that response continue to upend life.
For many, the work-from-home mandates that early period evolved into work-from-home options. Others eventually encountered a directive of “return, or else” – and, for some of those employees, the once-welcoming landscape of their jobs seemed hostile territory.
Melissa Fickling considers the state of flux as food for thought and cause for conversation.
Now the associate professor in the Department of Counseling and Higher Education is taking that conviction to the classroom.
“I think the cultural timing is right,” says Fickling, who is teaching an Honors 410 seminar on “Work, Meaning and Wellness” this fall.
“As we are in this stage of the pandemic, I think that a lot of people are really thinking – and rethinking – about, ‘How do my work and my life work together? How could they work together potentially?’ ” she adds. “We all learned things, and had to experiment, during the pandemic. Students are not excluded from that. They are thinking about their futures and how they want to construct their lives and their work while maintaining their wellness.”
Students from freshmen through seniors with a broad variety of majors already have explored the history of work, different cultural views on work, the impacts of gender and identity on work and even employment law.
Classroom discussions also have veered onto unexpected paths, Fickling says, as students have related personal stories, asked good questions and suggested additional topics.
“We’re starting to develop a shared vocabulary of what work is, what work has meant for people, how privilege plays into experiences of work and how work identifies us,” she says.
“One question that generated a lot of conversation came when we started talking about organized labor and the history of that movement in the United States. One student said, ‘This sounds ideal. Why aren’t unions more popular? Why wouldn’t all employers do this?’ ” she adds. “We got into the history of the different perspectives on that – the different theories or worldviews that inform how people feel about organized labor, what that means and how it’s been politicized.”
Her students now are beginning to focus on the “wellness” component of the seminar’s scope and, by the end of the semester, are expected to make connections that lead to meaning.
Students also will create and present independent study projects that examine work and wellness from a perspective of equity and justice.
Those also incorporate their reflections on what they learned from the course content as well as what they learned about themselves and what they want for themselves in the long term, “exploring our work philosophy and our life philosophy and putting those together.”
Fickling is learning and growing as well, calling the seminar “interesting and challenging” and finding herself fascinated by “how many disciplines look at these phenomena from their own lenses, and how different those can be.”
“This is driven very much by my personal curiosity and personal exploration in trying to clarify my values and my priorities when it comes to my life and my work,” says Fickling, who joined the NIU faculty in 2017 and earlier this year was named the Honors Program’s inaugural Rachowicz Faculty Fellow.
“Like so many folks in higher education, I think we can see all sides of the ways people approach their work, and I think to be a faculty member here, or anywhere, means a high dedication to our work and a real sense of going above and beyond to more opportunity that any one healthy person can possibly say ‘yes’ to,” she says.
“For me, this is very much tied into the work we each have to do, and how hard it is to be intentional in our careers,” she adds. “It’s really reenergized my focus on students, and I guess that’s a little ironic. I’m thinking about work for me, but it’s reminding me that my work is students – my work is their success, their well-being – so it’s just a really good feedback loop of curiosity, learning and growth.”
She expects it eventually will influence the curriculum for future sections of her Career Planning 211 and COUN 511: Career Counseling courses along with her interactions with graduate students in the Counselor Education program.
“It’s really refreshing for me professionally to just get outside of my comfort zone a little bit. It’s been a unique opportunity to teach outside of my immediate bubble,” says Fickling, who was encouraged by a College of Education colleague to develop and propose the Honor seminar.
“Just putting the proposal together sparked some creativity and curiosity for me because I teach career counseling, I teach mental health, I teach about wellness and I teach this to people who are going to be counselors to clients,” she adds. “When I removed that as my audience, it opened up new ways to put these concepts together.”
