CHAPTER 3: Making Meaning: The Common Theme in Crossover Content

Higher education is more than career preparation and learning how to listen to lectures, watch PowerPoint presentations, write research papers, and take and pass exams. While all of this is undoubtedly important, I believe that it is equally important for college students to make an enduring meaning in their lives and to learn how to pursue worthy purposes. No matter what I teach, the omnipresent agenda of my students is to make sense of their lives—past, present, and future. It was Viktor Frankl who said that “for the first time in human history most of us have the means to live but no meaning to live for” (Frankl, 2006, p. 140). In this chapter, I will explain the meaning of meaning-making. Along the way, I will briefly describe my and my coteachers’ approach to teaching for meaning. Our teaching-learning pedagogy emphasizes the importance of holistic, multidimensional scholarship, storytelling and personal narrative writing, and what we call “moral conversation”—all the instructional strategies that we mentioned in passing in the previous chapter. In this chapter, we will develop these pedagogies in greater length.