想象一下，你是一个探险家，正在寻找地理上的或“真正的”北极. 你的指南针帮不了你, 因为它指向地磁北，而不是“真北”,你的实际目的地.
学生们试图辨别通往终极的道路, 个人, and professional goals face a similar problem if their own “compass”—like the magnetic compass pointing askew from true north—guides them to attractive yet unfulfilling outcomes.
帮助学生探索他们年轻生活中最重要的问题, 并在他们的大学和职业生涯中支撑他们, 林奇教育与人类发展学院的梁belle教授 and her research team are developing a digital application they’ve named “True North,” a term often defined as the force that guides and fuels a person’s ambitions.
林奇教育与人类发展学院的梁belle教授 (Lee Pellegrini)
梁说, 谁教咨询心理学, “在一个充满挑战和无限改变世界的世界里, students are overwhelmed with critically important questions: How do I make good with the privileges I’ve been given? 我如何集中我的精力和才能? 我想成为什么样的人，我想让我的生活朝哪个方向发展? How do I navigate the college experience so I can best leverage the opportunities before me during this fleeting ‘window of time?’”
These student-posed questions prompted 梁 and colleagues to envision a web-based app whose goal is to foster student formation and purpose during adolescence and emerging adulthood. The True North app uses evidence-based best practices in youth purpose and formative education to help students investigate and discover 个人 pathways to finding “purpose,” which goes well beyond the narrow definitions of success in a society that frequently emphasizes 个人 fame and fortune as the definitive measure of achievement.
“不列颠哥伦比亚省的学生属于Z世代, 1990年代中期至2000年代中期出生的人口群体, who have grown up during the most ‘game-changing’ period of technological advancement in history,她解释道. “这一代数字一代正在努力寻找自己的目标, 但他们需要现代工具来做到这一点, and that means applying our research findings on purpose development in classroom curricula as well as in digital spaces where they are most at home, 社交活动, 连接, 和探索.”
“True North将帮助学生有选择性地设计他们的本科课程, 管理BC所提供的丰富资源, 为他们在大学里的成功做好准备, 他们的职业生涯, 他们的生活.”
梁, BC家长, 真北的特征, 现在在beta测试中, as a decision-making tool that guides students through a systematic discernment process, integrating and updating the Jesuit spirituality that grew out of the experience of Ignatius Loyola.
“基于我们的太阳城官网结果, 我们正在建立一个灵活的, in-person curricula as well as an app through which students can identify their respective ‘callings’ or long-term, 个人ly meaningful aspirations that are simultaneously of consequence in the world. They then intentionally plot their college experience so that it aligns with what is 个人ly meaningful to them, 以及什么是专业实用. True North将帮助学生有选择性地设计他们的本科课程, 管理BC所提供的丰富资源, 为他们在大学里的成功做好准备, 他们的职业生涯, 他们的生活.”
True North guides students to zero in on four elements called the “4 P”s that contribute to finding purpose based on 梁’s and her colleagues’ research: People—empowering relationships with those who nurture and encourage them in their journey toward purposeful aspirations; Passion—defining what is loved and valued; Propensity—identifying particular skills and 的优势 related to one’s purpose; and Prosocial benefit—identifying ways to use one’s passions, 的优势, 以及为更大的利益做出贡献的技能.
“对目标的渴望似乎是普遍的，”她说. “Our research has focused on young people from a variety of demographic backgrounds, and ‘purpose’ was relevant for youth from the most marginalized to the most privileged communities. It’s critical to us that our work on the True North project represents a true community partnership of researchers and practitioners from diverse settings.”
具体地说, the digital application has been developed in collaboration with her research colleagues, Professor Terese Lund (Wingate University) and Professor Angela DeSilva Mousseau (Rivier University), 和蒂姆·克莱因, a former high school guidance counselor who is director of Strategic Partnerships at Project Wayfinder, a purpose-learning curriculum designed at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (known as “the d. school”) that equips students with tools and skills to create purposeful lives. 梁’s research team is informed by and comprised of Gen Z students from various backgrounds at BC and beyond. “真北”课程将在第一代学生中试行, 低收入的大学生.
Her effort dovetails with the University’s Strategic Plan that calls for a re-commitment “to formation among students, 教师, and staff to further 太阳城网赌平台’s mission and strengthen its institutional culture” during the next decade and beyond.
梁报告说，她和她的团队已经设想了《太阳城官网》.0”—a more advanced version of their original concept—and are excited to join with Lynch School Charles F. 多诺万,年代.J., Dean Stanton Wortham and others at BC who are dedicated to creating tangible tools for purpose and formative education that will empower all higher education students to find their way from college to career.
“The app and the purpose curricula are an effort to combine the best research and practice in formative education at the Lynch School, 用我们所知道的帮助人们确定和追求他们的目标,”她说。.
“我听过很多人说, 包括家长及各界专业人士, claim that you have to choose between pursuing a vocation that you’re passionate about and pursuing one that is professionally practical. 他们认为学生不能两全其美. What our research—and the tools we’re building—are about is finding that intersection, 真正的北方.”
——phil Gloudemans，《太阳城网赌平台》| 2019年5月