General education courses are the foundational courses that fulfill core curriculum requirements for students across degree plans, typically courses students take in their first one to two years at ACC. These include courses in areas like English composition, government, history, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. If your course appears on the ACC core curriculum or satisfies a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) component area, it qualifies. For example, Anatomy and Physiology is a general education course in the natural sciences component. If you’re unsure whether your course qualifies, please check the Core Curriculum Course List.
This initiative grows directly out of work that ACC faculty have already been doing successfully for years. Programs like the Great Questions and the Liberal Arts Gateway, now unified under the LEAD initiative, have demonstrated that intentional, faculty-driven inquiry into foundational questions produces meaningful outcomes for students. The Character Education Initiative is an opportunity to scale that success across general education courses college-wide, bringing the same rigor, community, and purposeful design to disciplines beyond those programs’ original scope.
The initiative was co-developed by ACC faculty: Kelly Greenwood (Mathematics), Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. (Government/Humanities), and Arun John (Composition and Literary Studies) with Grant Potts (Philosophy, Religion, and Humanities) serving as Administrative Advisor. The grant came to ACC because faculty proposed it and because the college supported that vision. The initiative is also being driven by eight institute faculty from across the college: Jaime Cantú (Biology), Laura Cortes-Franco (Student Development), Dania Dwyer (Composition and Literary Studies), Melissa Foote (Philosophy), Kathy Frost (Psychology), Bryan Port (History), Eli Ryder (Creative Writing), and Marilyn Wells (Physics). The communities of inquiry are co-facilitated by these faculty, with full institutional support from the Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Programs at ACC, Dr. Beth Knight.
This initiative has also been supported by a dedicated team of student interns. Hashem Shattory and Nirvana Abdullah Haifa, both serving as Marketing and Outreach Interns, have contributed to the initiative’s promotional and community engagement work. Hashem is majoring in Business Administration with an interest in Human Dimensions of Organizations; Nirvana is majoring in World Languages: Arabic and Studio Art: Ceramics. Franklin Vinnerlid, serving as Research and Documentation Intern, is majoring in History.
Character education helps students develop habits of mind that allow them to access their whole selves, intellectually, civically, and ethically, as they move through their coursework, their careers, and their lives beyond ACC. The focus is on intellectual virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual honesty, along with civic virtues that most of us would recognize as already embedded in good teaching. If you have ever helped a student overcome a seemingly insurmountable academic difficulty in your course, work productively on a group project or have more meaningful conversations with peers about course material, you’ve been engaging in character education.
Skepticism is welcome. We’ve designed Communities of Inquiry to lead this initiative for a reason: to genuinely inquire, including asking questions about whether and how character can be taught. We hope you’ll consider joining your colleagues in this investigation!
