Lego Serious Play in a Career Exploration Class: A Case Study of a Failure in Faith Integration
Abstract
Lego Serious Play is a facilitated approach to solving problems that is popular in the world of business and nonprofits because it is both fun for the participants and has been validated as a means of encouraging communication and group problem-solving. In an attempt to provide a meaningful faith integration activity in an undergraduate career exploration class at a Christian University, a Lego Serious Play intervention was introduced to develop vocational identity. Vocational identity is a set of experience-based personal beliefs regarding one’s interests, goals, and abilities related to one’s career. From a Christian perspective, vocational identity would be influenced by the integration of Christian values and priorities, as well as one’s spiritual gifts. The intervention was designed as a pre-test/post-test control group experiment. The quantitative results of the study showed no differences between the outcomes of the control group and the intervention group, t(16) = .26, d = .12, p = .40, 1-tailed. In a debriefing focus group, it became clear that students had a limited understanding of vocational identity and that the faith integration elements of the intervention were not clear to them. Factors that appear to have contributed to this failure in faith integration include inappropriate assumptions of students' understanding of career and vocation, a lack of trust in the Lego Serious Play facilitators providing the intervention, false assumptions concerning the students’ spiritual status and maturity, a small sample size, and an over-reliance on the attractiveness of Lego Serious Play.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Dr. Wendi Dykes McGehee, Dr. Todd Pheifer, Dr. LaShan Epperson, Dr. David R. Dunaetz (Author)

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