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
Developing a Character Education Approach to Race
The climate surrounding race discussions in schools is fraught with emotional strains. Those advocating for greater awareness of racial injustices often use strategies that can lead to disempowering, “single story narratives” and can foster reactive responses. Racism is a deep and abiding problem in America, and we need to break out of polarizing polemics and the suppression on true dialogue this creates in order to foster openness to the complexity of truth and to empower transformation. This is as true in the small scale of an educational institution as it is on larger scales.
Building on previous work surrounding the Courageous Dialogue Toolkit (Whitlock, Bohlin et. al., 2021), this work hopes to discern what factors correlate to improved reports of courage to engage in dialogue about race. In previous work, it was found that students were more comfortable engaging in a conversation with a stranger about race and disagreeing with a family member about race after a taught intervention unit took place. However, there were many other categories in which students changed their comfort rating after the unit which this work will investigate. Another research query involves how definitions of racism evolve as students gather more complex stories drawn from historical and real-life role models. The power of social media-driven definitions of racism tend to devolve into more simplistic definitions of racism, and risk perpetuating a “single story narrative” (Chimamanda, Ngozi Adichi, TED, 2009). By expanding the stories, we are exploring if students demonstrate added complexity toward race in qualitative responses to provide additional context for our survey results. The broad vision of this research is to build a character education-based model of how to engage in discussions about race by using moral dilemma-focused study to facilitate key elements of phronesis as identified by Kristján Kristjánsson (2015) and role model emulation models to facilitate both courageous dialogues and improve the understanding of moral complexity in understanding race.
Interested in applying?
You can find more information here including eligibility and application deadlines, or you can contact h.odonoghue@bham.ac.uk