An Invitation to Community
“We believe the invitation to community is in many ways the most important part of the Educating Character Initiative. We may introduce you to like-minded individuals who have registered for the community and look at ways that we could bring together small conferences or workshops in which people with shared concerns can learn with and from each other. So please register for the community. Tell us what you want to learn and what you’re already doing that can support the community as a whole.”
–Beth Purvis, Director of the Educating Character Initiative
(From the Grants Webinar Replay)
The Educating Character Initiative aspires to empower generative partnerships with and among individual faculty and staff and undergraduate institutions—partnerships of mutual learning organized around creative and thoughtful new projects in character education. We would be delighted for you to join us.
Whether you are just beginning to explore an interest in educating character or have been teaching, researching, or educating character for years, we invite you to join us in one or more of the following ways:
- Register as a member of the Educating Character Initiative community. Membership registration includes identifying areas of interest and ways in which you might like to contribute to the network. We envision this international network as a collaborative community of practice where we learn from and with each other, so we hope you will join not only for what you might gain but also for what you might offer.
- Attend the international webinar series on “The Flourishing Student” co-sponsored with the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues and a number of other higher education institutions (Register here for the Flourishing Student webinar series).
- Participate in a monthly virtual workshop series hosted by the Educating Character Initiative (coming January 2024).
- Attend a conference or convening hosted by the Program for Leadership and Character and Educating Character Initiative (more details to come).
- Contribute to research and resources focused on educating character.
- Apply for funding to support your own research, programming, and/or professional development through one of four types of Educating Character Initiative grants.
- Request consultation with Educating Character Initiative staff in developing a character education project.
By creating and sustaining a broad-based network of individuals and institutions that serve faculty, staff, and students from different backgrounds, traditions, and disciplines, we seek to encourage diverse perspectives on character in higher education and support opportunities to learn from each other, experiment with new ideas and pedagogies, and benefit from the individual and collective wisdom of our community. We invite participation from individuals and teams from higher education-serving non-profit and educational organizations and all two- and four-year colleges and universities—both public and private, secular and religious—including but not limited to research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, military academies, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, single-gender colleges, and tribal colleges.
“We believe the invitation to community is in many ways the most important part of the Educating Character Initiative. We may introduce you to like-minded individuals who have registered for the community and look at ways that we could bring together small conferences or workshops in which people with shared concerns can learn with and from each other. So please register for the community. Tell us what you want to learn and what you’re already doing that can support the community as a whole.”