Interview Story - Time You Failed

One of my biggest failures happened in my current role, as a Visiting Faculty member in Contextual and Pastoral Theology at the University of the South. I spoke with a number of students who expressed concern that there wasn't enough training around counseling and pastoral care. They worried that they wouldn't be able to support their parishioners without a deeper background in this area. Specifically, they were concerned that didn't have enough practical experience.

I saw an opportunity to apply my educational experience in Jungian psychoanalysis and experience supporting parishioners to create a practical course for these students.

To develop this program, I first spoke with the Academic Dean to explain the course concept and get her support. I shared with her the concerns of the students and the need for this addition to the curriculum. With her approval and enthusiastic support, I reconnected with my own professors from Union Theological Seminary who had taught similar courses. I discussed these courses with them, reviewed their course content and reference texts.

I listed the course as a small group practicum, with a maximum of 12 students. But when the enrollment period closed, I had only 1 student sign up. Ultimately the course had to be canceled for that semester.

I was baffled and a bit embarrassed that the course had such a lack of interest. To understand why this course failed, I got back in touch with the same students who had requested the course. Through these conversations, I discovered that there were some problems with the course listing that lead to their hesitations.

First, the biggest problem was that these students were concerned that the psychoanalysis part would require their own participation in therapy, in which their most intimate details would be shared in front of the entire class of students. Second, the course had been scheduled at a time that was in conflict with a course that these same community-oriented students wanted to attend, the well-regarded, "Speaking to your parishioners" sermon practicum.

After these two discoveries, I updated the course description to better speak to the counseling and care part of the course and de-emphasized the psychoanalytic aspects, revised the course time, and recruited these same students to enroll in the course. The course received the best student ratings of any course that semester, and in the semesters since then, the course has been fully enrolled, and there have been usually a 10 person waiting list. With the popularity of the course, I am now training a fellow faculty member on the material so that we can offer two sections next fall.