The Center for Purposeful Work at Bates College

Launched in 2014, Bates College’s Purposeful Work program has drawn national recognition for its approach to student development and career preparation. It is rooted in the core principles of the liberal arts, has curricular and co-curricular aspects, and takes a four-year, developmental approach to working with students with a dedicated staff focusing on exploration as a practice before students determine professional career pathways they work to explore further. The concept of purposeful work is based on the premise that meaningful work, however each individual defines it, is fundamental to shaping a life. The Bates program helps students determine how to navigate the evolving worlds of work based on developing their own sense of identity, agency, and purpose.

Signature programs include the Purposeful Work Internship Program, Practitioner-Taught Courses, the Purposeful Work Infusion Course Program, and the Exploration Team.

The world of work and workforce needs are rapidly evolving and Gen Z and Alpha’s priorities about what they want and need from their work experience are significantly different from Gen X and Y. Purposeful Work at Bates provides opportunities to explore one’s strengths, values, interests, and desired impact on the world and gain the skills and experiences necessary to find work that aligns those aspects of one’s identity. This experience will yield for Bates students the exploration and reflection skills to continue to seek and achieve meaningful, purposeful, and productive work and lives for decades to come.

Purposeful Work at Bates comprises a suite of programs over the course of a student’s four years that build the competencies of work and purpose exploration, reflection, testing, and articulation of skills, strengths, interests, values, and alignment. The approach is holistic, touching students in the classroom as well as in co-curricular, extra-curricular, and residential areas of their Bates experience. It is developmental, connecting with first year students (and even prospective students and families) about the exploration emphasis, offering opportunities that build upon each other in developmentally appropriate ways through their senior year. 

All Purposeful Work programs prioritize equity and access to help fulfill Bates’ equity promise to all students, with specific attention to students who do not come to Bates with prior or family knowledge of the professional job seeking process, the “hidden curriculum” of job and internship search, or an inherited network of professionals. 

The Purposeful Work Infusion Program aims to recruit 20-30 faculty participants each semester. Participation includes:

Bates established a Purposeful Work Working Group of faculty, staff and students to establish contexts of work and purpose as they related to the Bates experience. This working group met for 18 months, resulting in a white paper with a list of priorities, models at peer institutions, and potential programs. From that work, the working group  established a four-person Design Team led by a faculty member in developmental psychology and an advisory board of faculty and staff. Funding came from a presidential initiative fund given by a group of trustees to support salaries and initial program costs. Additional funding for a pilot of one curricular program - the Purposeful Work Infusion Course Program - came from a grant from Bringing Theory to Practice. The Design Team built and implemented the foundational programs of the initiative: a set of practitioner-taught courses; the infusion of purposeful work elements into courses across the disciplines taught by Bates faculty; a paid summer internship program. The Design Team also established core elements and learning goals for the overall initiative, to include reflection, intentional decision making, a sense of purpose, and resilience.

Purposeful Work Infusion Course Program: a pilot project was executed by the director of the design team and a partner in the Harward Center for Community Partnerships to invite five faculty members to infuse purposeful work into their courses. Students enrolled in the Infusion Courses completed a pre- and post-survey which included scales measuring engagement (Engaged Learning Index: Schreiner & Louis, 2006), reflection (Self-Reflection and Insight Scale, SRIS), sense of purpose (Purpose in Life subscale of Ryff Scales of Psychological Well-Being), resilience (Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale Abbreviated, CD-RISC2) and intentional decision making (Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale - Betz, Klein & Taylor, 1996).

For the pilot year, Purposeful Work Infusion Faculty were recruited from among colleagues who were closest to the design and priorities of the initiative. For subsequent years, they widened the circle gradually, enlisting participation from supportive colleagues, using the metaphor of inviting people to dance, first from people on the dance floor, next to people around the dance floor tapping their feet, listening to the music, and finally to people further in the periphery, gradually becoming aware of the dance. The Purposeful Work team made announcements and invitations at faculty meetings and in college-wide faculty news channels, and introduced the program in new faculty orientation, to department chairs and at department meetings. They send reminders and invitations each semester to teaching faculty to invite them to infuse in the current or following semesters.

At the intersection of the Purposeful Work initiative and the short term curriculum, in 2014 Bates experimented with a set of 4 courses taught by practitioners outside the faculty, as an opportunity to add new expertise to theour curriculum and expand the offerings Bates  to Bates students in a variety of fields beyond our existing departments and programs. 

The general guidelines and process for this pilot experiment were approved by the Educational Policy Committee (EPC - currently the Academic Affairs Committee); specific courses and practitioners were approved by the Committee on Curriculum and Calendar (CCC , Bates’s Curriculum Review Committee), based on recommendations made by other campus groups with relevant expertise and stake. 

The practitioner-taught courses were assessed for their impact on the enrolled students and their broader institutional impact. Results of that assessment informed future conversations about whether to refine and further institutionalize the practice of offering such courses.

Guidelines for practitioner-taught courses: 

Process for selection and approval of courses: 

Student evaluations indicate that the Practitioner-Taught Course model is delivering strong experiential learning opportunities. On a five-point scale, students reported particularly strong improvements in applying learning from other courses in practical, hands-on contexts (4.59) and developing skills they can use in future work settings (4.54). They also noted meaningful progress in developing skills applicable to campus and community engagement (4.32), building skills and projects suitable for resumes and potential employers (4.07), and exploring potential career pathways (4.27).

Overall, the findings suggest that Practitioner-Taught Courses provide meaningful experiential learning opportunities that allow students to actively apply knowledge and engage deeply with real-world contexts.

Survey data from students following their participation in the Purposeful Work Internship Program indicate strong gains across a range of reflective, integrative, and career-related learning outcomes. Students reported high levels of agreement in their ability to identify their passions, interests, and sources of curiosity (4.4), create learning and professional goals informed by those interests (4.4), and connect knowledge gained in one experience or context to other situations (4.5).

In addition, students indicated meaningful progress in identifying and articulating their strengths and challenges (4.6), providing evidence of how they have applied those strengths (4.5), and building a network of people who support their exploration of the world of work (4.5). Overall, these findings suggest that the internship experience, paired with structured reflection, plays a critical role in helping students translate experience into self-understanding, articulate their value, and make connections between their academic learning and future work.

Post-course survey data from students enrolled in Purposeful Work Infusion Courses indicate strong levels of engagement and perceived impact on learning. A large majority of students agreed that the purposeful work material, in which faculty members connect course content to discussions of meaning, purpose, work and/or careers, enhanced their engagement in the course, with 73% reporting they “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree”. Similarly, 70% of students agreed that purposeful work material enhanced their understanding of course content.

Overall, these findings suggest that integrating purposeful work concepts into courses, helping students appreciate and articulate connections between what they’re learning in class with career, purpose, and meaningful work, helps students engage more deeply with course material.