Building Leaders: UM Project to Integrate Character into Classroom

Ole Miss is among 29 universities nationwide to receive an Institutional Impact Grant through the Educating Character Initiative, a part of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University.

Deborah Mower, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Practical Ethics, and Melissa Jones, associate director of the Trent Lott Leadership Institute and director of leadership endorsement programming, will use the grant to help incorporate moral, civic and intellectual virtues into classrooms across the Ole Miss campus.

"There is a very specific conception of character as it comes from the traditional discipline of philosophy and ethics, which is where it's the development of certain kinds of traits or virtues that enable people to engage with others and make good decisions," Mower said.

"This is really a return to a more classic liberal arts conception of what education is truly meant to do: develop the whole person."

The cross-disciplinary project is meant to pull together existing efforts across campus and create new opportunities for students, faculty and staff to learn about character-driven leadership.

The five key tenets of character – respect, fairness, civility, intellectual humility, personal and professional integrity – are based on the university's creed, Mower said.

"When you look at the UM Creed, those are lists of values that people across the university think are important," she said. "But different units treat them in different ways.

"Some units treat the creed as an important concept. Others treat them as a value. Others treat them as a type of action. Others treat the creed as just a pledge."

The researchers hope to develop a campuswide benchmark for incorporating these aspects of the creed into the classroom as well as co-curricular events and programs, Jones said.

"This gives us a cohesive way to really unify all of these efforts across campus units in a way that they've never been," Jones said. "We have some great work being done here, but it's never been unified in this way and centralized."

The researchers plan to bring in speakers, create reading groups and educational models, and develop new courses for students, among many other goals. Throughout the grant, the researchers will also collect data to track their progress, which will be published to help other institutions that hope to incorporate character development into the classroom.

"Another component we're thinking about is how the kind of integration of these virtues and these three categories is going to help promote more inclusion, feelings of belonging and authenticity," said Grace Rivera, assistant professor of psychology, who leads the project's research team.

"There's so much great work already occurring on campus, but now we can come together and spotlight if there are places where people's work hasn't been highlighted or isn't being heard."

Though the grant will last three and a half years, the researchers said this project is meant to permanently influence how the university conducts education.

"We asked ourselves, how can we make the biggest impact in every corner of this campus, in this community, if we are the recipients of this grant?" Jones said. "This university has always created great leaders. We want to do that even better.

"We know the university is growing and it's expanding and it's enhancing its profile, not just for research, but for leadership and the capacity of the students who come out of here as leaders across the region and the country."

This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from Wake Forest University and Lilly Endowment Inc. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wake Forest University of Lilly Endowment Inc.

Top: Deborah Mower, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Practical Ethics, teaches a class on moral psychology. Mower is helping lead a charge to integrate character-driven leadership into classrooms across the Ole Miss campus. Photo by Srijita Chattopadhyay/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services