Making Teaching Matter for Civic and Intellectual Life Project Overview
Summary:
The project focuses 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.
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. In 2024, we received a grant from the Educating Character Initiative to support this work.
The team had three aims: 1) To institute a professional learning community (PLC) among faculty focused on character development; 2) elevate student voice to describe ethical struggles that they face so that faculty can meet student needs; and 3) engage in pilot work evaluating change in students’ awareness of and concern for character to understand the impact of the work.
In the 2024-2025 school year, we successfully established a PLC with 12-15 faculty across EHD who met monthly. These PLC meetings provided a dedicated space for EHD faculty to share practices, reflect on course goals, discuss the challenges in implementing character-focused practice in the classroom, and deepen their understanding of character education.
A crucial part of our project has been infusing student voice into our capacity-building efforts among EHD faculty. One key element was partnering with students in our Youth & Social Innovation (YSI) major through their capstone project. The students’ capstone involved authoring a set of articles capturing undergraduate students’ perspectives on how to meaningfully cultivate character in university classrooms.
Our work represents a first step toward a long-term goal of supporting students’ efforts to choose meaningful and impactful careers, enhancing character virtues in our graduates, prioritizing the cultivation of character in our courses, and sharing activities and materials across UVA and beyond. In the 2025-2026 academic year, the project team will focus on exploring best practices for cultivating curiosity. If you are interested in joining our faculty learning community, please reach out to our project manager, Jasmine Truong, at jmtruong@virginia.edu.
With that, we are excited to share products developed by the YSI Capstone Team.