The Making Teaching Matter for Civic and Intellectual Life project aims to spark interest in character development among faculty and students in the School of Education and Human Development. The work, led by Drs. Sara Rimm-Kaufman, Jamie Jirout, Rachel Wahl, and Jim Soland, has focused on the cultivation of civic virtues including civic engagement, discourse across differences, and ethical decision-making as well as intellectual virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility.

Liberatory education scholar Paulo Freire is one of the most influential thinkers in curricular studies. Cited over 120,000 times, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) is a fundamental text within the field. One framework from Freire's work is of a "problem-posing" pedagogy which leads students towards praxis, the capacity for action and reflection in the world. However, merely "posing" problems leaves space for disengagement from praxis. This article contends that supplementing problem-posing education with the framework of “moral breakdown” would benefit educators by helping them understand their role in facilitating dialogue (Zigon 2007; 2024). Understanding moral breakdown would help professors lead dialogue that requires students to become critical of their worldviews. Thus, moving beyond a problem-posing and towards an ethically expansive and tolerant pedagogy.

While part of the responsibility of student engagement and discourse lies within students, there are important actions and strategies that professors can incorporate into their classroom that can encourage and facilitate these practices. This article will explore practices that I have observed as successful in my own classes, practices my peers have identified to be successful, as well as what some professors have reported to be their useful strategies for increasing and navigating student engagement and civil discourse in their classrooms.

Integrating character virtues into the higher education classroom nurtures increased academic success and community engagement. For minoritized students especially, this can lead to a greater sense of resilience, empowerment, and social mobility. Developing character virtues like perseverance, teamwork, and hope can be essential in overcoming the structural barriers that underrepresented students undergo while facilitating civic engagement and leadership within their communities. In this article, I will break down the benefits of incorporating teaching civic, moral, and intellectual values in the classroom, with a special emphasis on their impact on minoritized students.

A sense of safety in the learning environment is crucial for students to have a firm foundation to take intellectual risks and to engage effectively with the material, their classmates, and professors. Research has suggested that students’ perceptions of professor warmth and psychological safety in their learning environment are more predictive of engagement than teaching style alone (Tormey, 2021). This means that going beyond a change in instruction style is necessary for student engagement—an instrumental factor in effectively intertwining character education into the curriculum. How a student feels in the classroom is important for their engagement and learning, much of which is influenced by their relationships with their professors and with their peers, as facilitated by their professors. Professors tend the soil of the classroom and plant seeds of character through relationships that can be continually nurtured throughout the course.

Across institutional roles, responsibilities, and disciplines, college and university leaders are adopting a renewed focus on the vital importance of character education, both for forming students to use their knowledge, skills, and capacities to serve humanity and for highlighting the distinctive value of higher education in contemporary life. Current faculty overwhelmingly see character formation as part of their role: in a recent faculty survey administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 85% of 20,000 faculty across 143 four-year institutions said they “agree” or “strongly agree” that it is important for faculty to “develop students’ moral character” and “help students develop personal values.”

Across several fields, scholars are advancing more sophisticated and practically

relevant accounts of character, and experts have illuminated why educating good character can be a valuable purpose for institutions of higher education. In particular, intentional efforts to educate character can support student wellbeing and flourishing, sustain academic excellence and integrity, promote equitable and inclusive community, foster good leadership and citizenship, advance career preparation and vocational discernment, and encourage the responsible use of technology. In many cases, educating character can also support an institution’s efforts to fulfill its distinctive educational mission, values, and aspirations.

Despite renewed academic interest in virtue ethics and character education, institutions of higher education have largely neglected the character education of university students. This article seeks to make two contributions to the theory and practice of character education within the university, with a particular focus on postgraduate students. First, it provides an accessible synthesis of recent research in philosophy, psychology, and education to advance an Aristotelian model of character education and identify seven strategies of character development: 1) habituation through practice, 2) reflection on personal experience, 3) engagement with virtuous exemplars, 4) dialogue that increases virtue literacy, 5) awareness of situational variables, 6) moral reminders, and 7) friendships of mutual accountability. Second, in the discussion of each strategy, it supplies examples from a case study of the Oxford Global Leadership Initiative to show how the strategy can be integrated into a research-based, practical program for postgraduate character development. By providing both a theoretical framework and practical examples, this article seeks to offer guidance for educators who aspire to develop character education programs in their institutional contexts.