Upcoming Webinars and Book Club
Educating Character Initiative Fall 2025 Webinar Series: Character For, With, and In Community
Join us for a series of online workshops on character for, with, and in community moderated by Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character Education with the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University. These sessions feature panelists and presenters who engage questions about how to deepen, extend, and shape communities for greater wholeness; how to engage in this work with reciprocity, care, justice, and hospitality; and how character is formed and expressed through good communities. We are pleased to offer these webinars in a forum that enables more of the ECI community to learn from others who are doing important work across the country.
Session 3: Forging Character in Community: Living the Vision
Session Leader: Angel Adams Parham, Associate Professor of Sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
Description: Many colleges and universities see important connections between character development and community-engaged learning. In this session, we engage Angel Adams Parham in a conversation about her experiences living and working in an inner city New Orleans community and how this shaped her life and work. We discuss her work with college students utilizing both traditional methods of service learning and a community host program in this community through the non-profit she founded, Nyansa Classical Community. And we reflect on insights from college students working in Nyansa’s inner city Philadelphia program.
Date/Time: October 14, 2025, 4-5 pm ET on Zoom
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
Session 4: Character, Community, and the Common Good
Session Leader: Suzanne Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director at the Institute for Social Concerns and Professor of Practice at the University of Notre Dame.
Description: In this webinar, we engage with Suzanne Shanahan about what it means to pursue the common good with character and in community. Shanahan’s research focuses on understanding the refugee experience in East Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia with special attention to how displaced persons construct moral boundaries around what is right, just, and fair. Her recent research examines the causes and consequences of domestic child sex trafficking for children and families in the United States.
Date/Time: November 11, 2025, 4-5 pm ET on Zoom
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
Session 5: Grantee Spotlight: Character For, With, and In Institutions
Session Leader: Some principal investigators for current ECI grantees.
Description: A moderated panel discussion focused on efforts to form character within their distinctive institutional contexts.
Date/Time: December 9, 4 – 5 pm ET on Zoom
Moderator: Aaron D. Cobb, Senior Scholar of Character, Educating Character Initiative
The Flourishing Student Webinar Series, in Partnership with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at The University of Birmingham
In recent years, many universities have expressed their commitment to a holistic, socially-engaged vision of higher education and are increasingly talking about supporting students to develop ‘character’ and ‘attributes’. These are the qualities necessary for students to navigate the fourth industrial revolution, flourish, and make a positive contribution to society.
This international webinar series, presented in partnership with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at The University of Birmingham, features presentations on the role of universities to help their students to cultivate the character and attributes required for human flourishing. After the success of the first series and second series, in this third series, six more world leading universities renowned for their focus on character education, will share their knowledge and expertise.
Session 1: Notre Dame University
Session Leader: Suzanne Shanahan, Professor of Practice and the Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director at the Institute for Social Concerns
Date/Time: October 1, 2025, 10 – 11 a.m. EDT
Session 2: Universidad Austral, Argentina
Session Leader: Claudia Vanney, Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Belén Mesurado, Vice Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Director of the Psychology Program at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences
Date/Time: November 18, 2025, 9 – 10 a.m. EST
Session 3: University of California, Irvine
Session Leader: Duncan Prichard, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology and Society; Director of The Anteater Virtues Project
Date/Time: January 19, 2026, 12 – 1 p.m. EST
Session 4: SDU University, Kazakhstan
Session Leader: Speakers to be confirmed.
Date/Time: Specific date and time in March 2026 to be confirmed.
Session 5: University of Teacher Education Vienna
Session Leader: Roland Bernhard is a professor of “School Development, Leadership & Leadership Culture” at the University of Teacher Education Vienna/Krems and Fellow at the University of Salzburg
Date/Time: May 5, 2026, 9 – 10 a.m. EDT
Session 6: Superior University, Pakistan
Session Leader: Syed Ali Mohsin Naqvi, Director CAKCCIS, Chaudhry Abdul Khaliq Center for Contemporary Islamic Sciences
Date/Time: Specific date and time in June 2026 to be confirmed.
ECI Community Book Club
ECI is pleased to announce a happy development in the format of the ECI Community Book Club format for AY 25/26: authors of each of the four ECI Book Club selections will attend gatherings to discuss their work in real time with character educators. An ECI staff member will interview the author during the first half of each gathering. The second half of the book club will be spent in audience Q&A. Fall 2025 discussions will focus on cultivating student-teacher and peer-to-peer relationships and classroom cultures that nourish character development.
Minding the Gap: Moral Ideals and Moral Improvement by Karen Stohr
Book Description: Most of us care about being a good person. Most of us also recognize that we fall far short of our moral aspirations, that there is a gap between what we are like and what we think we should be like. The aim of moral improvement is to narrow that gap. And yet as a practical undertaking, moral improvement is beset by difficulties. We are not very good judges of what we are like and we are often unclear about what it would mean to be better. This book aims to give an honest account of moral improvement that takes seriously the challenges that we encounter–the practical and philosophical–in trying to make ourselves morally better.
Moral improvement should be understood as the project of articulating and inhabiting an aspirational moral identity. That identity is cultivated through existing practical identities and standpoints, which are fundamentally social and which generate practical conflicts about how to live. The success of moral improvement depends on it taking place within what she calls good “moral neighborhoods.” Moral neighborhoods are collaborative normative spaces, constructed from networks of social practices and conventions, in which we can articulate and act as better versions of ourselves. The book concludes with a discussion of three social practices that contribute to good moral neighborhoods, and so to moral improvement.
Author Bio: Karen Stohr is the Ryan Family Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University and a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her primary research area is ethics, especially contemporary Kantian and Aristotelian ethics. She is particularly interested in the ways in which moral values and ideals get expressed in social life. Stohr is the author of three books—On Manners (Routledge, 2011); Minding the Gap: Moral Ideals and Moral Improvement (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life (Oxford University Press, 2022), as well as articles on topics like friendship, beneficence, practical wisdom, moral imagination, social conventions around disability, and the moral aims of dinner parties. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washingtonian, Notre Dame Magazine, and other publications. She is also a frequent guest on radio shows and podcasts.
Date, Time, Location: Thursday, 4pm, September 25, 2025 via Zoom
A Pedagogy of Kindness by Catherine Denial
Book Description: Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part how-to guide, A Pedagogy of Kindness urges higher education to get aggressive about instituting kindness, which Denial distinguishes from niceness. Having suffered beneath the weight of just “getting along,” instructors need to shift every part of what they do to prioritizing care and compassion—for students as well as for themselves.
A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions outline nothing less than a transformational discipline—one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive.
Author Bio: Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and winner of the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching award. Issues of care animate Cate’s historical research and pedagogical praxis. Cate’s book Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013) and subsequent scholarship explore the early nineteenth-century experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in Upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures. She is presently researching the life of Susan Richardson, an African-American woman who escaped from slavery to establish herself in Galesburg, Illinois in the 1840s.
As founder and director of the Bright Institute at Knox College, Cate oversees a program which supports thirteen faculty from liberal arts schools across the United States in their teaching and research for three years. Each fellow attends an annual two-week summer seminar on new scholarship in early American history, and receives $3,500 in research funding per year. Beyond Knox College, Cate is a pedagogical consultant who works with individuals, departments, and institutions in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S. Cate’s new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, argues that instructors and institutions of higher education must urgently focus on compassion in the classroom
Date, Time, Location: Thursday, 4pm, October 23, 2025 via Zoom