Community colleges change lives. They open paths to better work, higher earnings, and real economic mobility, and we’re proud of that work. But if the only message students hear is that education pays, what have we left out? The steady drumbeat of professional advancement can crowd out the things students already care about: family, faith/belief, community, justice, truth.
We see no contradiction between economic mobility and a moral life. Character education–embedded in general education, taught within the disciplines–can hold both. That’s plausible here because of who our students are. Our students arrive carrying strong moral commitments and a basic orientation toward others. What many have overcome just to reach our classrooms has already taught them what those commitments demand. What they need is the occasion to examine and extend that work.
Character is cultivated when students exercise that agency through the excellences embodied in the disciplines they study. Therefore, we don’t hand students a fixed list of virtues to acquire; we invite them into a shared investigation of character, as participants rather than recipients. Our role is to create the conditions where that inquiry, and the flourishing it makes possible, can happen.
General education’s excellences are often dismissed as “soft skills,” but they’re the very capacities ACC already names as its core general education competencies: Critical Thinking, Social Responsibility, Personal Responsibility, Teamwork. Aligning those competencies with character is how we unlock what general education can do.
Our framework builds on the Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues at the University of Birmingham, and on a decade of faculty work in Great Questions, Honors and the Liberal Arts Gateway programs.
Our aim is a transformative experience for students and faculty.
| This Initiative Focuses On… |
|---|
| Habits of Mind That Empower Genuine Learning in Individual Disciplines |
| Redesign From Within Individual Courses |
| Discipline-Specific Tools Built by Faculty Attentive to Student Needs |
| Designing Conditions For Virtues To Grow |
| Sustained Communities of Practice |
