The Character Catalyst Grant, provided by the generous support of the Kern Family Foundation, offers USA-based graduates of the Jubilee Centre’s MA Character Education programme an opportunity to advance their existing work in character education.
Below are the successful applicants of Character Catalyst Grant and you can find an outline of their projects below.
Jayme Giovannetti
Augustine Preparatory Academy
Service and Debate
The aim of the project is to evaluate the impact on student character growth in the areas of generosity, empathy and critical thinking via participation in a service-based club.
The Service Club will recruit a small group of High School students to participate in once-weekly meetings that aim to identify social justice issues the residents of our city face and the organisations working to address those needs/issues. Specifically, we will seek to examine how to align participants’ right motivations to serve with the right results for the recipients; examining the cultivation of compassion, generosity, and gratitude for both sides. To do this effectively, our work will centre on evaluating social justice issues through the lens of relationships, specifically which relationships are broken that are causing injustice. We will then examine existing work and determine how they address recipient dignity and empowerment. Next, we will work with organisations that from our analysis are combating injustice and empowering recipients/partners, in essence, we will be able to create a list of ways to engage in their work. This information will be compiled into a catalogue for our high school in their efforts to give back, combat injustice, and work towards the betterment (read “flourishing”) of our community. Finally, we will host a service day at the end of the school year and invite our broader school community to participate in partnership with some of the organisations we have built relationships with throughout the year in our city.
Zachary Loveless
Hyde Park Institute
Developing Training Resources for Mentors and Faculty Partners
Hyde Park Institute (HPI) is an independent non-profit that provides opportunities for character formation to University of Chicago students. To offer these opportunities, HPI collaborates with external partners including faculty, alumni, and professionals who help tailor programming to specific audiences, lead program sessions, or provide individual mentoring to students. While HPI’s partners bring subject-matter and industry expertise, they often lack a background in the language of character and the means of its cultivation. To facilitate our collaboration with external partners, this project will develop suite of character education resources to help our partners come to a deeper understanding of virtue and how it is cultivated, thus further promoting virtue literacy, reasoning, and practice in program events, individual mentoring, and for-credit courses.
Overall, the project has two central aims. First, the project will develop an easily digestible resource guide to character education. The guide will outline what character is and strategies that promote its development; provide examples of practices to implement specific strategies as well as program templates that implement these strategies holistically; and include profiles of key virtues centred on promoting virtue literacy, reasoning, and practice. Second, the project will develop a series of training videos to serve as part of our orientation for program mentors. The training videos will draw on the resource guide, providing detailed illustrations of what character is, how it is cultivated, the role of mentors in helping program participants develop character, and examples of how to fulfil this role. By executing this project, we hope to provide resources that help onboard our character education partners and that are a valuable source for future staff and other character educators.
Dr Maureen Spelman
North Central College
Cultivating Moral Reasoning in Aspiring Leaders
Virtue literacy has been defined as perceiving, knowing, and understanding virtue language and concepts needed to make reasoned judgements. While cultivating each of these components can lead to mastery of a particular virtue, the foundation must first be laid through the development of a common virtue vocabulary and opportunities to translate that knowledge into action.
The first aim of this research proposal is to determine if candidates participating in character & virtue-based interventions will demonstrate advancements in the development of virtue literacy in the initial course and will maintain and/or continue to demonstrate growth at the end of a two- year program. Writing samples gathered prior to the start of the educational leadership program, at the conclusion of the first course, and at the end of program will provide data on the development of virtue literacy in aspiring leaders.
When virtues are viewed through a Neo-Aristotelian lens, they are interconnected and orchestrated by the meta-virtue of practical wisdom. A valuable method for developing moral decision-making processes and practical wisdom may be through sustained practice with authentic ethical dilemmas. Practicing with and responding to authentic ethical dilemmas through a structured reflective framework allows candidates to engage in collective phronesis, make sense of complexity, and choose an intelligent and virtuous response to ethical dilemmas.
The second aim of this research proposal is to determine if candidates exploring education-based dilemmas will demonstrate advancements in the development of moral reasoning in the initial course and will maintain and/or continue to continue to demonstrate growth at the end of a two- year program. The Defining Issues Test administered prior to the start of the educational leadership program, at the conclusion of the first course, and at the conclusion of the capstone course will provide data on the development of moral reasoning in aspiring leaders
Dr Michael Hahn
Saint Mary’s University of MinnesotaUniversity Character Education: Contributing to the Conversation
There is growing interest and research in the area of university character education. American universities have undertaken initiatives to renew a focus on character development as an aim of education. At the same time, there is a need for a greater diversity of perspectives to contribute to this conversation.
Character friendships is a topic of particular importance for university character education. Aristotle devotes two chapters in his Nicomachean Ethics to the ways that friendship shapes us, and recently there has been renewed interest in friendship as a method of moral education (Kristjansson 2022). Since friendship is also an important topic in the Christian tradition, the perspective of faith-based universities is a necessary voice to include in the conversation. Through the publication of two journal articles, this project will explore the complementarity of Aristotelian and Christian understandings of friendship and the educational impact. In addition to the focus on friendship, related questions include: What “value-add” does an Aristotelian character education approach provide for faith-based universities? And what does Christianity add to an Aristotelian understanding of virtue?
A related and critical area of importance for university character education is curriculum development, particularly how to effectively integrate a character-focus into undergraduate and graduate programs. While several American universities have recently undertaken this work, there still remains a dearth of practical literature and resources about how to do this effectively. This work will explore a recently completed a university curriculum project for a graduate education program. Through this multi-year process, several lessons were learned that are applicable beyond the university. This project endeavours to prepare an article for publication that includes lessons from our experience, practical suggestions, and strategies for curriculum integration. Since one of the cohorts in this program is offered in Kuwait, it will also emphasize the transnational, transcultural, and trans-religious appeal of this work.
Barbara Whitlock
Montrose School
Toward a Character Education Approach to Teaching about Race in the U.S.
While teaching about Race in the U.S. has been complicated by the effects of political polarization, the principles developed through character education research offer a fresh lens to illuminate old challenges. I will introduce research from a three-year intervention study to support greater engagement in dialogue about race, which expands upon the 2021 research published in The Courageous Dialogue Toolkit (Whitlock & Bohlin, 2021). This current research promises to inform teaching practice while offering insights into building school culture. Character education research on moral exemplars and moral dilemmas informs this approach that has antecedents in the work of W.E.B. Dubois and targets the roots of racism in “the danger of single stories,” as coined by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Nigozi Adichie.
Dawn Bradley
Libertas School of Memphis
Staging Virtue Initiative
Libertas is the first public charter school in Tennessee to offer the rich, personalized learning method of Dr. Maria Montessori, and operates the nation’s first dual-certified urban Montessori teacher residency. Libertas opened in 2015 to transform Tennessee’s second lowest achieving school; now it is one of the fastest improving and highest achieving for at-risk students. Exclusionary discipline was virtually eliminated in an area where adverse childhood experiences are prevalent.
One key to success is a school culture anchored by “virtue study.” From age 4 to 10, students develop character through interactive read-aloud of classic literature from across cultures.
Now that we have opened the doors to our new middle school (age 11-14), we are eager to extend our program to meet the unique needs of adolescents. Dr. Montessori said that adolescents need to “play a part” in the wider society they are entering. Building literally on her insight, our new Staging Virtues initiative will help students draw on the treasury of inspiring (and cautionary) stories (“virtue literacy”) they’ve learned as younger children and begin to explore what it means to truly enact virtue, through performing dramatic, morally complex scenes from literature and real-life scenarios. Our goal is to build both virtuous habits, and practical reason – finding the right way to do the right thing.
This innovation aligns with our emphasis on human-centred education for “minds, hands, and hearts,” while using the dynamic form of theatre as a means of positive peer pressure during a time when adolescents have increased concern with how they are seen by others.
Character friendships is a topic of particular importance for university character education. Aristotle devotes two chapters in his Nicomachean Ethics to the ways that friendship shapes us, and recently there has been renewed interest in friendship as a method of moral education (Kristjansson 2022). Since friendship is also an important topic in the Christian tradition, the perspective of faith-based universities is a necessary voice to include in the conversation. Through the publication of two journal articles, this project will explore the complementarity of Aristotelian and Christian understandings of friendship and the educational impact. In addition to the focus on friendship, related questions include: What “value-add” does an Aristotelian character education approach provide for faith-based universities? And what does Christianity add to an Aristotelian understanding of virtue?
A related and critical area of importance for university character education is curriculum development, particularly how to effectively integrate a character-focus into undergraduate and graduate programs. While several American universities have recently undertaken this work, there still remains a dearth of practical literature and resources about how to do this effectively. This work will explore a recently completed a university curriculum project for a graduate education program. Through this multi-year process, several lessons were learned that are applicable beyond the university. This project endeavours to prepare an article for publication that includes lessons from our experience, practical suggestions, and strategies for curriculum integration. Since one of the cohorts in this program is offered in Kuwait, it will also emphasize the transnational, transcultural, and trans-religious appeal of this work.
Antar Salim
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota
The intersection between character strengths and leadership: an exploration into virtues.
This project aims to create a learning module to explore the intersection of character and leadership. Specifically, it will provide participants with a richer understanding of their character strengths and strategies to leverage those strengths to enhance their leadership capabilities. The first portion of the session will focus on the relationship between character strengths and virtues. Particularly, how character strengths are combined to forge the six major virtues. The second portion is geared to provide the learner with a working definition of leadership and tangible tools to leverage various character strengths with the overarching objective of an enhanced leadership capacity.
This two-hour interactive session will proffer learners with preliminary insight into their 24-character strengths based on their customized Virtue In Action (VIA) profile. At the conclusion of the session, learners will not only have individualized competencies to improve their leadership abilities, but action items to continue to ameliorate their leadership skills moving forward.
The project aims to add to the current toolbox of training modules that can be used by the character education community by creating shareable slides and training notes. The training module can be aimed at enhancing the educational experiences of students and staff, it also can be used to offer future professional development training.
Ashley Brandon & Emily Farkas
Grand Canyon UniversityActivities and Applications: Integrating Character Development and Trauma-Informed Practices in PK-12 Settings
The aim of this project is to bring together a diverse group of experts in character development and trauma-informed practices to collaboratively create a comprehensive resource for educators. This resource, a carefully crafted book of activities and applications, will serve as a bridge between trauma-informed strategies and character development, offering educators practical tools to foster positive character traits while addressing the unique needs of students who have experienced trauma. The activities included will be rooted in research and designed to promote character growth within a trauma-sensitive framework, ensuring they are both effective and supportive. This book will not only provide a wealth of actionable resources and ideas but also offer valuable insights into the connection between trauma-informed care and character education. It will equip PK-12 educators and school leaders with essential knowledge, processes, and strategies to create an environment that supports the holistic development of all students. By grounding the activities in proven research and evidence-based practices, this resource will empower educators to integrate trauma-sensitive approaches with character development initiatives, ultimately helping students build resilience, empathy, and positive social-emotional skills.
Nancy Erickson
Saint Mary’s University of MinnesotaGratitude Journaling and the Impact on the Benevolent Virtues of Gratitude and Compassion
Creating a flourishing society is the ultimate goal of all schools and universities. The purpose of this project is to develop and expand on previous research on gratitude journaling and the possible connection of the benevolent virus of gratitude and compassion.
In this research project, the goal is to create a gratitude journal that will be given to students at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. The journal will give students the opportunity to develop the practice of gratitude journaling as a tool they can develop for their entirelives. As evidence shows, cultivating gratitude helps individuals to flourish and virtues in adults can be developed by habituation, practice, critical thinking and reflection.
The newly designed gratitude journal will also be used to conduct another research study, using a larger sample size from the School of Education at Saint Mary’s University. The study will examine if the students experience growth in gratitude from writing in the journal. Through empirical study, the research will attempt to expand the theoretical evidence on the connection between gratitude and compassion.
Interested in applying?
You can find more information here including eligibility and application deadlines, or you can contact h.odonoghue@bham.ac.uk