Many institutions of higher learning have departed from the work of moral formation, opting for the privatization of meaning and an orientation toward markets. Some schools operate differently, acting intentionally to form students of good character. As valuable as these efforts are, we believe there is more to do — work that requires an expanded imagination.
Traditional approaches to character formation are limited by a near-exclusive focus on the formation of an individual’s virtue. This model is committed to an individualistic theory of change: spend time instilling character and leadership qualities in individuals, then send those individuals out into communities and institutions where they can make the community better, good, or more virtuous. In this model, one hopes that more virtuous human beings emerge, capable of flourishing and building just, equitable, and flourishing communities. From this work, perhaps eventually, we will become less fragmented as a culture.
The traditional model lays a strong foundation for building communities of character — but it’s not enough. Largely absent from the traditional model are research and practice that center social dimensions of character—factors that could be uncovered through sustained engagement with disciplines such as history, political science, sociology, philanthropy, and economics, or by engaging with communities outside the college setting. Character-building efforts that aim at the common good need a model of character formation that accounts more fully for institutions, cultures, and broader social forces.
“Character-building efforts that aim at the common good need a model of character formation that accounts more fully for institutions, cultures, and broader social forces.”
This was one of the central insights that emerged from shared conversations on character formation and college students with a diverse team of scholars and practitioners in an ECI Capacity-Building grant called the Common Good Character Trust (hereafter, the Trust). As we parsed the challenges of traditional models of character education, we began to wonder what it might look like to develop an expanded imagination for character that foregrounds, in equal measure, social, political, and cultural dimensions of formation.
One potential source we explored for novel insights focused on well-known efforts across higher education to pursue diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and affordability. For simplicity, we will call this the contemporary model. These frames have rightly focused on identities, structures, and hierarchies, yet they have sometimes placed too little focus on place, history, ecology, economics, and wider, often more subtle social forces. Even in the effort to center sociality and create belonging, the contemporary model has, in some ways, assumed too narrow a frame.
Like the traditional model, the contemporary model is committed to a theory of change similar to the one outlined above. Both models are noble, well-intentioned, and helpful. We can see the fruits of their labor in the individual lives of students who participate in, or are the recipients of, such efforts — how they lead, how they treat people, how they help society function more consciously. While many of the efforts in these models acknowledge the relative importance of situations, environments, or context, the spotlight is on individual agency, choice, accomplishment, signaling, and moral virtue independent of, or only slightly affected by, such forces as culture, power, and larger structures. And while traditional and contemporary approaches are more than willing to say that context matters and the social ethos is important, the effect, often, is that sociality is named but effectively ignored.
Through conversations characterized by hopes for new possibilities, the Trust considered what it might take to extend the prevailing models by giving equal account to the total context in which character emerges. This led to a cascade of questions:
- What strategies might we need if we approach character formation in ways that center the social along with the individuals?
- What are institutional and community-based conditions and policies for such an endeavor?
- What kinds of faculty, research projects, courses, networks, and policies might we need if we are to pay more than just lip-service to the fundamental need for common good character formation in our current cultural moment?
Common Good Character (CGC), an emerging concept we are attempting to develop, takes seriously our individual formation, broader culture formation, and the interactions between the two. Given the excellent work done within traditional and contemporary models, we know a great deal about individual formation. But CGC must also reckon with the spaces we inhabit and our influence in shaping those spaces. CGC requires formation that helps us see others as wholly unique individuals, as members of various groups, and as inhabitants of a social location for which we bear some responsibility to co-create and steward. We must continue with what we know, drawing heavily on principles of reciprocity, consciousness, and mutuality to account for the different realities each of us inhabits.
“Common Good Character requires formation that helps us see others as wholly unique individuals, as members of various groups, and as inhabitants of a social location for which we bear some responsibility to co-create and steward.”
To make this expanded work more concrete, it is helpful to consider how individual formation might be situated more fully in relationship with cultural formation. Cultural formation refers to the ways we attend to and shape our shared spaces — the places where individuals are formed for reciprocity and mutuality and are subsequently better equipped, able to move through exchanges, power dynamics, and resentments toward common goods. In some ways, attention to social spaces is itself an enactment of individual virtues — civility, courage, and hope to name a few. But culture formation requires acknowledging that while individual dispositions or character traits might be rooted in individuals, the pursuit and enactment of character are always collective and moral projects within communities, cultures, and institutions. As Robin Wall Kimmerer has notably observed, all flourishing is mutual.
“Culture formation requires acknowledging that while individual dispositions or character traits might be rooted in individuals, the pursuit and enactment of character are always collective and moral projects within communities, cultures, and institutions.”
Culture formation, then, includes not only attending to the historically transmitted pattern of meanings and norms in a given space, but also to the structural forces, ideological, imaginal, technological, material, economic, environmental, ecological, social, and geographic conditions inside institutions and communities. CGC requires that we then spend our time shaping cultures in at least equal measure to the ways we shape individuals.
What does this look like in concrete practice within a college or university setting? The Trust could only begin to imagine, but we offer some ideas. It might look like institutions thinking deeply about engaged and experiential learning that serves and foregrounds real common goods. For example, students might engage in teaching ESL and learn the virtues of humility, civility, and hospitality, while, within a broad cultural context of various social challenges, their immigrant neighbors learning English might be able to catalyze their learning into new opportunities. A reciprocal relationship might invite both parties to gain mutual understanding — of one another as individuals, of positionality or privilege, of social context, cultural difference, and common humanity. In turn, the English learners might secure more stable employment and might also become more confident in their involvement in their children’s education. And these factors, together, might help reduce income inequality and racial wealth disparities over time — a common good outcome in which we all have a vested interest.
This is an example of a project in character formation where there are real common goods in play — not just the immediate gains of the two parties involved in the interaction, but also changes in material conditions, clear connection to broad social and economic structures, even pathways to decreased polarization as people of vastly different views and life experiences develop mutual understanding. This involves, to some degree, accounting for cultural factors while also attempting to shape them.
What else might culture formation, as a dimension of character formation, involve? It might require attending directly and decisively to a range of variables and dynamics such as history, power, philanthropy, policies, practices, texture, customs, monuments, the built environment, economics, symbols, and structures, to name some dimensions. A Common Good Character imagination would also attend to dynamics in a range of spaces and planes, interactions, rituals, and fields (e.g., individual vis-a-vis institutions, neighborhoods, cities, nations, etc.). This might look something like institutions engaging their real estate operations teams, archivists, architects, campus planning and space utilization departments, and sustainability divisions as much as they do their residential programming, first-year experience, or core curriculum efforts.
It might look like enrolling incarcerated students in degree-granting programs while they are inside the carceral setting (the individual formation model), and also engaging university legal counsel, risk and compliance offices, and human resources to ensure that such individuals, once released from prison, are able to access and maintain not just economic opportunity, but full standing and citizenship within the university community (cultural formation) despite their criminal records.
We have been imagining this work together, and we invite you to do the same. The implicit model of change within this new space is that cultures flow through people and are internalized and expressed through individuals — their agency, their choices, their actions, and their character. People, ideally people of character, in turn shape cultures. Implementing such a model will most certainly require a wider imagination for what counts as character work — and also what such an imagination requires of individuals and institutions of all types and contexts. Aiming at Common Good Character requires imagining, first, and attending, second, to the social dimensions of individual formation through the traditional route. But it also requires efforts to move beyond this and center the social, acknowledging the relationship between character and power, and thinking deeply about the extent to which ideals, institutions, and individuals together — and culture and power more broadly — shape character.
Dr. Andrew Hogue is the Associate Dean for Engaged Learning at Baylor University.
Dr. Emily Hunt-Hinojosa is Director of Research and Community Impact for the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.