Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This was made by humans.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to Austin Community Conversations, a podcast featuring discussions about the interests, backgrounds, and projects animating the members of a vibrant college community.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only.
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[00:01:11] Speaker C: Welcome to the Conversation. I'm Tonio Ramirez.
I invite you to imagine that you're a young student and that one of your teachers is asking you a question about your future.
What question do you imagine them asking?
I suspect that for many of us, the question will be something to the effect of what do you want to be when you grow up?
Now, focus on the sort of answer that this question tends to elicit. Answers pertaining to roles or occupations likely spring to mind. A sensible answer to the question might be, I want to be a teacher. I want to be a doctor, or perhaps even I want to be a parent.
But suppose that we asked our students a different question, not what do you want to be? But how do you want to be?
This isn't a question about career or role, but about the kind of person I strive to become, and it gives rise to very different sorts of answers. I might want to be compassionate or joyful or courageous.
What would happen if we encourage students to focus on these sorts of character traits when they think about their educational outcomes?
My guests today are Arun John, Kelly Greenwood, Grant Potts, and Ted Hadjiantich, and they'll be talking about their work on the Character Education Initiative at Austin Community College. I think this work has the potential for profound impact on the way that we think about both teaching and learning and invite you to imagine the possibilities. Along with us, let's dive in.
[00:02:42] Speaker D: Ted Hatziancic, Arun John, Kelly Greenwood, Grant Potts, welcome to the Conversation.
[00:02:48] Speaker E: Thanks for asking.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:02:50] Speaker D: So, Ted and Grant, I don't want to give you a short shrift, but you've already appeared on the podcast in the past, so people had the opportunity to go back to those episodes and learn a little bit more about how you came to work at ACC and your respective fields. But just as a real quick reminder for listeners, Ted, among other things, you are a professor of government here at acc.
And Grant, you are, well, your adjunct professor now of philosophy and religion.
And then in addition to that, you serve as the. Sorry, remind me of the Full title
[00:03:21] Speaker E: Dean of Curriculum Management, Dean of Curriculum Management and Humanities, and professor of Humanities. Very good.
[00:03:28] Speaker D: All right, so I'd like to begin by inviting Arun and Kelly to talk a little bit about your respective backgrounds. Because one of the things that I think is really interesting about this group is that it's something of a motley crue in terms of the academic backgrounds. And it's, I think, going to be interesting to see how those perspectives coalesce around this idea of character education.
All right, so, Kelly, I'm curious about your background and story and how you arrived at acc.
[00:03:57] Speaker F: Well, it was a journey.
I started my teaching career in middle school and I loved every single minute. I taught down on the border where I'm from, South Texas. I taught in Harlingen, Texas, and I loved my students and I loved my job and I needed to get out of town, so I went to grad school because that was the excuse I could give my family. And I went to grad school at Texas State University. And while I was in grad school, I taught there. And I'd never taught adults before.
And it was very eye opening because these adults that had struggled with math their whole lives were in college now. And getting to see it finally click for them was amazing.
I loved it. But then after grad school, I wanted to save the world. So I went back and taught one year of high school, and that was not fun whatsoever. There was a big.
There's a lot of pressure to teach to the test, and it sucked all the joy out of teaching.
So I did that for one year. And when I was in grad school, I kind of got the idea that I wanted to be at ACC because I loved working with adults. Like that was my end goal. Like that's what I wanted to do. But I also wanted to save the world.
So I went back to high school for one year. It wasn't for me. And that's when I applied at acc.
[00:05:20] Speaker D: Okay, and how many years have you been here now?
[00:05:22] Speaker F: Over 15.
[00:05:23] Speaker D: 15 years. Okay, so plenty of long time. Very good. And Arun, how about you? What's your trajectory to getting to acc?
[00:05:31] Speaker A: Like Kelly, I think it was a journey. I'm still on it. I guess I didn't start out thinking that I would ever end up teaching. Both my parents were teachers and I wanted to be as different from them as possible.
But then out of grad school, my first real job was at a community college in New York. And I taught in three different colleges in New York. And I would take the subway to all of those, and I fell in love with it. And I went to school in Texas, undergraduate in Texas at ut, and my wife's from Texas, and we. She did not like New York much. I was fine.
But so we moved back, and the only place we wanted to move back to was Austin. And so I came here.
I applied to teach in the creative writing department as an adjunct faculty, and I got a job there, and I was teaching that, and then I also interviewed in the English department, and I got called the day before classes started to go teach a class. And so then I was thrown into it. And that was 19 years ago, I think.
[00:06:49] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: And now I teach English, creative writing, and also humanities. Great questions.
[00:06:55] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So.
[00:06:56] Speaker D: And I'm going to surmise that since you started teaching in creative writing, that at that point, you had already established yourself as a creative writer to an extent.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: I don't like to think of myself in that. I still struggle with that because I've written. But then since I started teaching full time, that's gone out the window. So I try to write when I can, but it's difficult to do.
[00:07:19] Speaker D: So all four of you are active faculty at acc, in addition to holding other roles. So where we teach in multiple disciplines. Kelly, are you teaching exclusively in math?
[00:07:29] Speaker F: Yes.
[00:07:31] Speaker D: But in addition to those roles, you're involved in a whole lot of other projects at the college. But gather you together here, because as a team, you guys are doing some pretty exciting work that I'd like to learn a little bit more about around the idea of character education.
And so would any of you want maybe just give a background about how you arrived at this project where the opportunity to bring character education to ACC came from?
[00:08:01] Speaker E: Well, I think it's interesting because it was synergistic, right? It was really that we were.
Ted and I were working around our great Questions work, and we had met these guys. Where were they from? They were from a nonprofit that was doing community education.
And they said, hey, there's this whole set of grants you should look into coming out of Wake Forest. And that's when we started looking at. We're like, hey, this looks like what we're doing.
What we were seeing in the Educating Character Initiative Institute, which is the funder of the project that we're doing right now, was a community that didn't include a lot of community college educators. It was mostly coming out of business schools and undergraduate programs and other programs, a lot of private institutions, though some publics.
But was.
Was talking about the educational experience as leading to the kind of Formation that we had kind of arrived at with other faculty when we were doing great questions, which really more has a kind of pedagogical focus on discussion based learning of core texts. And so wasn't necessarily.
I mean, I think we always had sort of a development of respect for truth, a development of things that are about becoming a better human at the heart of it. But I think in some ways we were more focused on the pedagogy as a process and less on, on the idea that there was some character formation happening. But as we, as we started looking at this, we were seeing, you know, they're having a lot of the same kinds of conversations, they're looking at a lot of the same kinds of things and expanding it out. That really includes more, more than where we were was very much a humanities focus, but could engage mathematics, could engage the sciences, could engage other modes of pedagogy. I don't know. What would you add, Ted, on that?
[00:10:15] Speaker G: Well, I think that when we first started doing great questions, we were thinking about taking something that already exists and figuring out how to make that more meaningful.
And I think that with the work that we were, that we learned a lot from doing that with great questions. How do you take kind of stale learning objectives and animate them through the liberal arts and in a discussion based environment?
And I think that we saw kind of an opportunity to do that with this as well. And I remember you and Arun and some other people like, you know, we were in, I think, your house grant and you know, we'd have people knock on the door who would be a part of our grant proposal. And we're sort of all like this sort of clan felt like this is sort of like clandestine operation. And you know, we were, we were sort of figuring out how do we translate the work we're doing in the liberal arts into this language of character education? Because there's this big body of scholarship on, on character education. And we spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out, you know, how to connect those dots. And it just, it worked. You know, they connected very, very well.
And so in part it was a sort of a translation project.
And through the process of that translation, we're able to see that this is a, this is actually the language and a rubric which is really accessible.
One of the things that, and Greg, you probably could speak about this better than I, but I know that when you talk to the workforce, people, you know, they, they're maybe not so excited about, oh, students are going to read this book together. But when we say students are going to develop intellectual habits and virtues that are, that, that, that, that can align with the outcomes of this workforce thing, they're like, yeah, character education work, we're all in on that.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: So
[00:12:18] Speaker G: is ecumenical the right word to describe this?
[00:12:20] Speaker E: I think so.
And I think that last point is important because part of what was happening because is that, I mean, part of what was happening is we were kind of looking around, what can we do to bring energy?
And by some level of necessity, since it is hard in community college, especially in the humanities and especially with, you know, there's a lot of ways you can get funding for a lot of things, but for whatever reason, developing quality education on the foundational level is not something that gets funded a lot like, you know, but so we were looking for capital, right? We were looking at grants. And Arun and I had been working on this NEH grant that we never, you know, we got it together, but we never got probably to our benefit. Now, considering how, what happened with NEH
[00:13:08] Speaker G: grants in the coming years.
[00:13:10] Speaker E: But I.
And we had.
That was looking at the humanities and saying, how can we think about humanities education as preparation for the world of work?
The world of work was an important phrase because we were saying, if we have an institutional orientation toward getting students placed into jobs as a post completion outcome, what are we doing to prepare students for that? And not just to be good workers, but to prepare as human beings to interact with that life of work in a way that ultimately leads to a good life, that ultimately leads to flourishing, that ultimately leads to, at the end of the day, what, what we really should be here as a public institution which is helping the citizens of Central Texas have better lives. Right? Yes. Giving them a better job is a good part of getting a better life, but you can do that in a way where you can make lots of money and have a miserable life. Right.
Or.
And not serve a community. And you know, so we were already kind of thinking in that framework and part of that work, we've gone around and talked to a number of workforce coordinators and chairs about this and we had this experience where when we were talking through the way we're thinking about things and hitting on some of those notes that eventually really aligned with character, they were like, oh, now I understand what all those general education classes that are stuck in my AAs are supposed to do. This is great. Like, I've always kind of just thought of those as like 15 wasted credits that like, you know, and so I think that's, that's a Definitely a part of it is that it helped people who aren't necessarily enmeshed in the disciplines that were a part of whatever those disciplines are, understand the value of those disciplines beyond just the discipline itself. But in terms of, you know, and what we're working on is these, as within the context of general education, that that general education framework is. Is actually valuable not just to learn math, but to develop all the dispositions, to develop the. Choose to develop what comes into you as a human being as you work through learning math, as you become a knower, as you become a thinker. Right?
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It was quite revelatory, actually, talking to folks who are not in our disc or in our area. I think when we got the capacity building grant, which was the first iteration, which came before this Institutional impact grant that we got, we did focus groups or interviews, basically guided interviews or conversations with faculty from academic transfer. We talked to faculty from workforce advisors and staff.
It was interesting to get a sense of what they thought the core curriculum did. And for a lot of folks, and I would argue the same thing goes for our students, they were like courses that they just took to get to what they really wanted to do.
And I think.
I think Ted Grant, Kelly and I have been here teaching for so long, I think we understood intrinsically what the value of. Of taking a math classes or taking English classes. But I think for a lot of folks, those seem just like hurdles that they need to get over and the value itself.
So. So in terms of when we started looking at the character education in the ECI Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest, we started to realize there was certain language that it gave us to talk to folks who may not be familiar with what it is we do in the liberal arts or in liberal education,
[00:17:03] Speaker E: and to talk to folks about an important thing, right? Which is that the outcomes we're looking for are not just skills, right? And even in our own kind of development of this grant and working with the folks at Wake Forest who, like, we would meet with, to talk as we were kind of drafting things, they were even like, it looks like you guys are a little skill oriented. And character is not skills. It's not just enough. It's not another way to repackage skills in a different way. It's getting that something fundamentally different.
That I think if you're coming out of the disciplines that are anchored in traditional academic education, at least for the last hundred years, even more deeply, whether that's math or political science or writing,
[00:17:48] Speaker D: or
[00:17:51] Speaker E: you're inheriting disciplines that did have at some point, a notion that there was a formation of the person at the heart of that education.
[00:17:59] Speaker G: Right.
[00:18:01] Speaker E: And that's kind of been lost in the skills language because it becomes this very discreet kind of quantifiable thing. And yet there were all these people over here saying, okay, we're working on character and we're working on how to do that so we can assess it, and we're working on doing it so it can fit the structures that have become part of higher education, while trying to be thoughtful about how to do that without just reducing it back into what we already have. If all we were doing was repackaging skills, it wouldn't be worth it. Right.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: You know, you might as well get a technical education. It's sort of interesting. I was talking to a small community college in rural Arizona, and they were. They were applying for.
They were thinking of applying for a grant through Wake Forest.
And they were talking about the students that had come out of their technical programs. And you know, the employers were saying these were students who are skilled at doing things, but when they went to the workplace, they couldn't interact with people or they make off color jokes.
And so the employers really wanted, in some sense, students that were.
Who had disposition, you know, who had dispositions that could, you know, that could be. Allow them to be successful in other ways.
[00:19:09] Speaker G: Yeah.
[00:19:10] Speaker D: Let me ask them maybe to kind of unpack some of the language that's kind of embedded in the remarks you've already made. So when I have talked to other people who are not directly involved with what you're doing, and I tell them that you're involved in a grant that surrounds character education, what I find many of them immediately connote is some kind of moral education. Right. Because of course, character is often thought about in a moral way. The word virtue, which you use is often thought of as a moral quality. And certainly there are ways of thinking about morality and right and wrong and judgment in terms of.
[00:19:47] Speaker G: Of characters and virtues.
[00:19:48] Speaker D: But it sounds to me like you're thinking about character and virtue in a much broader sense.
[00:19:52] Speaker G: Right.
[00:19:52] Speaker D: So just dispositions like you said, or traits that make you the person that you are that are not equivalent to skills per se.
[00:20:00] Speaker G: Right.
[00:20:00] Speaker D: So maybe, you know, by analogy, thinking about a moral virtue just by way of example. Courage is a classic example of one of these. But courage isn't a specific thing that you do. It's a way that you are. It's a disposition that you have to respond to a broader range of.
So what would be some examples of the kinds of character traits that you would hope students would leave acc with.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: I can take one. And then some of you. I'll take courage. Let's take courage. And we had the conversation today with our institute of faculty that are working on this. The question of courage did come up. And the idea was. The idea that was floated was in many ways, our students sometimes find themselves in classrooms that may be alien to them, that environment. Right. But the courage that if they can develop a courage to even ask a question or even go to see you during your office hours, that's a form of taking a step that you may be uncomfortable doing or you're not used to.
And what I appreciated quite a bit, like, you know, in terms of how when you. When you guys devised the great questions program, was to make sure that students came to talk to your professor once, in the beginning, at the end. So it sort of demystified that whole experience, sort of made it easier for them to do it. But. But courage is. Is. Is absolutely necessary in learning there. Do you take. It takes courage to acknowledge that you don't know something.
It takes courage to acknowledge that the person who you may disagree with has a point that may be valid. You know, and so in that sense, I think what we're trying to encourage in. In with this project is to think about these virtues not in a moral sense. I mean, yes, we want good people. Right. But more in the sense that these are. These are our traits that could be developed and honed.
And. And that's kind of my take on how I would look at courage if that was the. That was the trade we wanted to talk about.
[00:22:13] Speaker D: But, Kelly, in the domain of math, for example, is there a particular virtue that you think is available to students to cultivate in working with mathematics?
[00:22:26] Speaker F: Well, courage is a big one.
And in fact, I put that one in my syllabus. Now I just tell students, this class is going to help you practice courage.
I also picked out persistence and autonomy. And I think by just setting that expectation from day one, when students are recognizing that they're not wanting to ask a question, they're like, they have this word courage, like this common word that, like you said, gave them some vocabulary to these feelings that they're having and something that I've done with my students for a long time before I was on this project. On the first day of class, we do this red flags activity, and it's just a list of behaviors that might prevent them from being successful in math. Like, have you ever had a question but didn't ask because you thought you were the only person with that question? Or have you ever started your homework and gone immediately to an AI tool?
Have you ever gotten feedback on an assignment and didn't even look at it? So when I got onto this project, I started looking at that, thinking about what are the underlying virtues that we could like replace these or that would help replace these behaviors with more positive behaviors. That's how I came up with the courage, persistence and autonomy that I'm focusing on now. There'll be more. Gotta start somewhere. But since I've been doing that, I've noticed a huge shift in student engagement, just a sense of community in the classroom. So it's been a really positive experience. They're learning math more effectively, they're talking to each other.
So it's been a positive experience.
[00:24:09] Speaker D: Your project is ambitious in that you're not just looking at integrating these traits into instruction at the course level. You guys are thinking about a student's entire experience in terms of these character traits.
[00:24:25] Speaker E: Yeah. One of the main goals is to, for me, is to bring more coherence to the students experience of their general education curriculum. Right. And to not just have these discrete experiences, but to see a through line between them about developing themselves as knowers and as human beings.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:47] Speaker E: And the heart of, I mean, the heart of the way we've looked at it is to say the disciplines, the academic disciplines that are at the heart of the core. Right.
Have historically developed as virtuous ways of knowing. So.
And that they have developed ways of approaching this particular problem of how do we know the world in different ways. But taking them back to that at the heart, there's a whole set of dispositions that people who do that well, people who study philosophy well, people who study history, well, have developed these dispositions, these virtues. Can we, can we bring those out?
[00:25:25] Speaker G: Right.
[00:25:26] Speaker E: But I also, like, there's part of me that is increasingly when people are like, oh, that's just about moral education almost in this sort of negative way. I'm also like, yeah, it is about moral education.
Why is it like a weird thing that we would look to our institutions of higher education to help us all become better people?
Why is, why is morality taboo in our society?
I mean, I know part of it is that moral education historically has been used as a tool of subjugation. Right. And it's been used as kind of a list to beat people over the head and say, you got to be this, this and this. While the people who are putting that through are actually hypocrites. Doing something else, that's just bad moral education. That's not a. That's not a reason to throw out the whole project.
But I do think at the heart, there is still part of what we're doing that's saying, yeah, we should be learning together as faculty, as students, as members of the community, how to be better members of our community, how to be better parents, how to be better siblings, how to be better neighbors, how to be better students, how to be better faculty. And not just in the skills, but in being a good person, in the way you do that, and helping uplift yourself and others
[00:26:40] Speaker D: in character ethics and virtue ethics. Often the. The goal of that is described as something like flourishing, which is something that's in addition to being good for your community and for your family, it's good for you. The idea is that you get to be the best version of yourself. You get to derive the most satisfaction from your life.
We do certainly like to think about what we're doing with our students in this way, but maybe, if I may play devil's advocate just for a little bit here, because I have to imagine that anytime you're working on a new initiative, you're going to get raised eyebrows and get questions about this, the strategy you're taking.
So I invited you to review an article that was recently written by Claire Katz, who's in the Department of Education at Texas A and M. The article's called Stolen the Humanities Hidden in Plain Sight. I think that article is a really good kind of overview of the state of the art, of the kinds of challenges that humanity's disciplines specifically are facing in justifying themselves, if you will.
And I think that many of the issues turn out to be very relevant to STEM fields as well.
But one of the things that stuck out to me that could be a likely rejoinder to the character education project you're describing is that what you're really talking about is just soft skills.
It's this set of things that supplement the actual purpose of students being here, which is to train for workforce. So I want to have the skills that I will actually put to use in my occupation.
And the benefit of a little bit of philosophy, or a little bit of history, if you will, is primarily so that I won't make off color jokes during board meetings. And that's more or less the end of it.
How might we think about explaining what you're doing in terms that don't reduce to soft skills or one of these other kind of phrases that you hear pop up so often?
[00:28:38] Speaker G: Well, I Just think that whoever says that has the understanding of the aim of higher education.
[00:28:43] Speaker D: Wrong.
[00:28:44] Speaker G: The aim of higher education is not skills training primarily. It's human formation first.
The skills training that you get through that is an added benefit.
And I think that we need to go back to the whole purpose of a general education is to use this term flourishing. I think that's a good way of thinking about it. How do you prepare students for a life that of human flourishing?
And what we have at a community college is the first two years of a general education. That's 80% of our unduplicated enrollments are in core curriculum courses that meet those requirements. And if we're thinking about those in the term in just in terms of skill building, we're actually not being honest to the charge of what a core curriculum in general education is. You know, I mean if you look at like the, just, just the mission statement of like, of Gen Ed, you can easily interpret this in the language of human flourishing, even if it doesn't use the term flourishing. Right. I mean it's like civic, civic skills, critical thinking, you know, not being super credulous with, with ridiculous information. You know, I mean like all of these are, these are, these, these are not specific to any, any particular, particular job. And so I mean I think that I, the, the, I recalled the, the one of the parts of the articles, you know, the author suggesting that we, we sit in a circle, we talk about books because that's the whole point of being in that class. In fact, early on there was there, you know, I thinking about like, well, some administrator might look into the classroom and see people in a circle, regular books. Where's the teaching going? Like you're looking at it like what we, what we thought of as teaching is this like fact down download. You know, that's, that's, that's training. I think there's a difference between, between teaching and training. And I think our initiative is focusing, is focusing on teaching perhaps as was understood not too long ago.
[00:30:38] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:40] Speaker E: You know, part of what I think about is like right now at this moment when you have things like Coursera as an example of these sort of like online platforms to go through micro credentials and pick up a bunch of different skills. Skills. To some extent we can respond to that by saying, oh, we need to do that too in higher education. Or we can respond to that and say hey, that part is not the important part. Like what we provide in higher education is something fundamentally different than just the accumulation of a set of skills.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: And I take Issue with the term soft skills. Right. And these things are been tossed around. It's became marketable skills, whatever it is, you know. Right.
And I, I there. The reason you can't really define these things is that they're not skills. Skills can get outdated. They, you can lose skills. And especially in this world that you're living in where we're kind of rapidly transforming things. You can see it with the coding, you know, with people who do coding, the AI and AI is kind of doing a lot of that work now.
Those are these what, what we're offering is not skill training. We're actually offering a model where students actually become agents of their own sort of education. Right. If you're thinking about one of the things that we think that we want from higher ed is that you become someone who's able to learn new things, unfamiliar things.
And that's kind of what the liberal arts or the liberal education does, because students come into our courses, they encounter things they've never encountered before, and they're forced to deal with something that's unknown and then make sense of it, or some sense of it at least. And that actually gives them a certain, as you want to say, disposition to encounter something similar in the real world. So if you're talking about the, to Ted's point about, yeah, we're not, that's not the point of higher education, because we can easily see how things sort of atrophy and go away and are not relevant anymore in terms of skills. But I think it's more a kind of attitude towards yourself, towards your community, towards your world, a particular disposition to function well and flourish in that world is what, what we should be offering our students.
[00:33:09] Speaker E: And it's deep and rich and human. And I like going back to that article like that early. The first example she has about the Bell Labs for, for the, the podcast listeners. She describes this project at Bell Labs. I think it was like in the 50s that basically they took a bunch of executives because they were like, you can't work with humans well, and sent them to Penn for a year to study the humanities with top professors, and then came back and it seems like what they wanted kind of worked. But part of the problem she talked about was the people had gone through that were hesitant to say that this had made me a better executive, that these things had come for, like, there was a hesitancy, and as you read between the lines, is because there was, there was something deep and transformative that happened to them as a human being and what they walked away from yes, there were clearly ways it made them potentially a better manager.
[00:34:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:02] Speaker E: Because it turns out if you're a better human being, you can be a better manager, at least if you're trying to have a managerial system that is not brutal. Right. You know, like, but, but at the heart of it, it was about becoming a better human being in a way that was difficult to discern and quantify easily.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: You know, I think in the footnotes of one of the footnotes that she has where she talks about her brother, her elder brother who, who was chemical engineer and he, he told her, because he was a chemical engineer and she was human, studied humanities and she, he says, you were educated. I was trained.
[00:34:50] Speaker F: I felt that in my bones.
There's a difference.
[00:34:54] Speaker D: Right, Vanessa? So this is why I'm really excited, Kelly, that you're here in the group because I think it's easy to get excited about this coming from humanistic disciplines because in my own discipline, philosophy, for 15 years, I've begun my courses with this sales pitch about how engaging in philosophical reasoning and questioning can lead you toward flourishing as a human being. It's the thing I would expect my colleagues in the humanities to be on board with.
[00:35:23] Speaker G: Right.
[00:35:24] Speaker D: But I wonder what it means to take that approach in a field where it's not necessary to get buy in.
[00:35:35] Speaker F: Maybe.
[00:35:35] Speaker G: Right.
[00:35:35] Speaker D: So I think there's support for science, engineering and math, regardless of virtue and character. So what's in it for SEM to pay attention to this stuff?
[00:35:48] Speaker F: Well, I will say the whole trained versus educated struck me to the core. And when I read this article, I'm like, well, that's my college experience. And ironically I got my undergrad at Texas A and M and the author teaches there.
But my college education trained me to be a very good critical thinker in math.
And I don't teach math. I teach humans how to learn math.
So it wasn't until I got to grad school when I met people and my grad school was very narrow, focused on math.
But my classmates, some had gone to these liberal arts colleges and all these different places and they just had this whole different way of looking at the world that I didn't have. And I felt a lot of shame about that because I took a philosophy class. I checked my list that was on my pre plan, but it was more like the history of philosophy. I was in a class of 150 students and we had a textbook and I didn't know any different. I learned it like I learned math. These are the different types of things in Philosophy and I made flashcards and we never had a conversation.
And so I get to grad school and we're like sitting around having all these deep conversations. And that's when a little seed was planted that, you know, and I had to do a lot of work on my own. But where I started realizing I'm teaching humans. And it's, I think it said in here somewhere, like, the humanities are about learning about human behavior.
And once I got those habits of mind and skills, I became such a better teacher. And if I had been able to learn new things in that way from the beginning, I think I would have gotten to where I am much sooner. It took me like, like 15 years to figure out how to teach humans math.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:41] Speaker F: But, yeah, so I'm so excited with this project because I think we have this opportunity to, like, plant seeds and it takes time to become a good human. That's why, like, in that Bell experiment, it wasn't immediately measurable. And so now it's out. And I felt like, well, that describes math all the time. Like, I don't know how many times since I've been at ACC, we've been given some new initiative that lasts maybe a year because the measurable outcomes weren't what they were expecting. On to the next. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, like whiplash.
So, yeah, that really resonated with me too.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: And if I may, sorry, I'm going to share a personal story. I was a product of a liberal education by pure accident, right? I didn't go to a liberal arts school. I started off as a physics major because my parents felt I should do science. And I studied that for two years, got bored with it, didn't enjoy it, moved on to something else, computer science. And then eventually decided to radio, television, film as an undergraduate. But I remember talking about the difference between technician and being educated.
I was in these very technical courses, and my science education helped me become a better photographer in the sense I knew about optics. Right. So I knew all the things that they were talking about.
And I think about it, it's so interesting because if I had just gone into that technical field, I would have just become a technician. Like, I knew all these things, but the fact that I was exposed to English courses, film theory courses, history, gave me a different perspective on what cinema is as opposed to someone who just spend their lives just shooting out from a very technical perspective. And I saw that in, like, other friends of mine who were kind of products of a liberal arts education, but were also very technically Proficient. But it was the. It was the intersection of that technical proficiency and their sort of larger idea of what, you know, the fact that they had this. They did read, you know, Hemingway or whatever it was, allowed them to sort of bring a particular, different.
A more unique perspective to what they were doing as artists.
And so I think. I think when we think about that, that is the value where I think the intersection of all our disciplines matter, like what we're doing in this project, which is why I think it's really excited that we have folks from SEM and SBS as social and behavioral sciences and humanities and liberal arts, because I think we're kind of talking about why it's important to learn about all these different things. I didn't see my physics education as being valuable. I was. I thought it was. I was boring me at a. After a certain point. But I realized much later that it gave me a much wider perspective of what it was that I could do with myself.
[00:40:43] Speaker G: So, yeah, when I'm thinking about the.
The government major, the philosophy major, the math major, we're thinking about what's the experience that all of these majors have in that first year or two of general education that can help provide this sort of experiences that Arun and Kelly were talking about they got over the course of many years. You know, there are all these, you know, these college report cards, right? Like, what's the earning average earnings of it somethings or other, you know, and so there's no. There's all this push to be focusing on, you know, marketable skills and documented leads to earnings. I think that what we're doing is. Is in part saying that's so shallow. We can do so much more than that. You know, we can. We can show that there's an opportunity for higher education to contribute to forming a whole. Forming a whole person in a way which is commensurate with its public charge.
Members of our community pay their tax dollars to us. You know, we should do. We should aspire to more than just to be the training ground for private industry. You know, we've got a public responsibility, and I think that, that, that's to. That's to help. Help make. Help people become the best that they. That they can be.
[00:41:51] Speaker E: Yeah. And I think that part of what I would also add is that I think that the way higher education is set up, especially in community colleges right now with all these pressures, is doing a kind of moral education, right? It's educating people to be egoist or focus primarily on material value. We again and again say this is what you're going to earn. This is what you need to focus on. You need to focus on your own success. You need to abandon your community and go move to where you need to. You know, and a lot of that pressure, you know, is in the discourse of how we talk to students when we advise them. It's how we talk to students when we talk about sort of earnings, etcetera, is to say, think about material success.
Think about what's good for you. And that's a moral education. It may not be the moral education we want, but that's a moral education.
[00:42:39] Speaker G: And how's that going?
[00:42:40] Speaker E: Yeah, and so I think that.
I think part of what I've realized is we're always already in that space of educating character. The decision is, do we want to be intentional about how we focus that education?
For us, our intent is to focus it around developing agency for students. Right. That's different than a lot of the other projects we've encountered, which do. They may come from a religious school where they. They identify a certain set of virtues that are important for that tradition and really want to inculcate that on students.
To some extent, we're more interested in sort of bringing out their ability to have a good life for themselves on the grounds that they bring to the table and not necessarily by imposing something else outside. Sorry.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: I know. Yeah. And to that, I think also students are hungry for this stuff. I mean, they really are. I mean, one of the things that as we were sort of developing this project, what we were trying to do was sort of also connect, as Seth said, all of these different courses that students take in their first year to create sort of a cohesive thread as to why they're taking these courses and what they. What means to them as individuals.
And, you know, I've been sort of becoming more. I've become more explicit about that conversation in my classes, asking them why. Why are you. Why do you think the Grand Poobahs who designed your degree plans put you in my class?
And why did they put you in a math class? Why are you so. And having them sort of reflect on those questions as to what is the utility of being in this. In this course, along with something else. And I think for them that actually there's a spark there for them. I think they actually really think about what they're doing and why they're here. And we do talk about a lot about purpose and belonging in the college, But I think the idea of purpose and belonging is about creating meaning.
And I think what education should be doing is allowing. Giving our students the ability to create that meaning.
And that'll. That'll bring about purpose and belonging.
[00:44:49] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:44:49] Speaker G: Into it.
And to do that, it needs to also make. Enable faculty.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:44:57] Speaker G: It was one of the things that we've seen in focus groups and in our current experience with the institute. Like, faculty need to have communities in which they talk about the work that they're doing collectively across disciplines and the
[00:45:11] Speaker E: good they're producing together.
[00:45:12] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:45:12] Speaker G: It's not just let's. It's not just here are these classroom skills. Go use them now. It's something that we need to be actively doing together.
And we need to have our own intellectual lives that are. That are focused on our own character formation.
I ran four focus groups with students last semester. Just asking questions about their general education experience. Is one of the things that came up time and time and again is that what made a student feel like they really connected with the class was just that other human being in the room. Did they respect that person? Did they think that person actually cared about them?
Not did they do a gimmicky thing here or there to try to get, you know, quote, unquote, engagement, but did they actually genuinely care about them? And that. You can't fake that.
And I think that it's hard to get to that place when you have so many responsibilities on top of teaching and all of the bureaucratic pressures that come into play. We need to carve out more opportunities for faculty members to just be in the same room with each other and not to gripe about the challenges, but to set higher ideals and to try to figure out, maybe not even trying to figure out how to overcome them, but just to spend time with each other across disciplines like we've been doing in this institute. I mean, I think it's been a really good experience and one that I hope we can figure out some way to embed in the structure of what a faculty member's career is without having this sort of onerous evaluatory requirements.
And not another thing.
[00:46:59] Speaker D: I know that in some ways the work is still in its early stages. This is the first full year that you guys are working within the grant.
[00:47:06] Speaker G: Right.
[00:47:07] Speaker D: But from where things look to you right now, supposing that this gets the traction that you want it to, you're able to implement what you want to implement three years from now. What is the experience of an ACC student from front to back? How is that different? How would you describe the. The goal from the student's perspective?
[00:47:29] Speaker E: I think the experience would be qualitatively different if we were operating at scale.
[00:47:35] Speaker G: Right.
[00:47:36] Speaker E: Whether we can get there in three years, I mean, I think the way we plan, we'll have some scale, but if we get to real scale, which may be five, six, seven years down
[00:47:43] Speaker D: the road, we can imagine.
[00:47:45] Speaker E: Yeah, but would be that in your, whether you're in an AAS degree, a workforce degree, or in an academic transfer degree, that a significant portion of your education are a series of experiences where you are asked to reflect to some degree on who you are, who you want to be even. I mean, it's a lot of. One thing that's interesting with the character people is that they, they often like that we're working with is they're often operating in traditional four year schools with 18 to 21 year olds. So they're always like, oh, this is really important for young people. This is really important for young people.
And you know, there is that question like, I'm a 45 year old dude coming back to school, do I need character education? Because I've been.
And I think so. I think we're always developing this. I mean, that's partly what we've discovered too, is that the, the, the faculty have work to do, the institution has work to do around this so that they are, you know, so they're, they're in a point in life where they're seeking some sort of transformation.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: Why?
[00:48:52] Speaker E: That's why they're here. Right. The part of that transformation is a challenge to look at themselves and say, where do you really want to go? Who do you want to really be? What is the work you really want to do? Not necessarily the career, right. Not necessarily the job, but the work of your life. And how does what you're doing here fit into that?
And how does what you want exceed what you're doing here? That, that's something they have the opportunity to be challenged and, and then they do that in a context in which they're drawn into a community, the community of the classroom, other students, but also faculty, staff, administrators who are doing that work as well.
I think to a certain extent.
I mean, I don't want to be too. There's just part of me that's like we are at a moment in this country where if we're taking a hard look at ourselves as a civilization, for a civilization that had so much promise, that has so much of an ability to sort of take on what is it to be a, a community that works towards the aspirations of our constitution, the aspirations of our foundational Documents, whatever their problems are as well, the aspirations of all the people who have tried to work through that for 200 years.
We're at this moment where we're really failing. We're really failing as a people. We're really failing to live up to our ancestors.
And we need to confront that, not to beat ourselves up, but to say, well, where did we get off track? How can we get back to where we need to be? What were the tracks that we do need to abandon, but that we really need to get a better orientation toward?
How do we do this thing without being jerks to each other? How do we do these things where we are seeking to be in a space of flourishing together, that that's their experience, that this is at least a microcosm in which they can explore that in their general education curriculum in those classrooms.
I also think that they would experience faculty who are better people. Right. Who are kinder, who are more courageous themselves, who model the kinds of dispositions we want to help them develop, that they have. They encounter staff who are more like that they count, or administrators who are more like that. Because I don't think this is. As we dig into this work, it's not a. It is. It part of it is actually at its heart, and maybe this is part of why it meshes well with what we were doing with great questions about decentering education from being. We're the experts here, right, to teach you the thing. But what we're experts at is learning how to do the thing together. And we're here to really do that work together so that they. They. They have classes where their faculty are approaching them with more humility and grace, to be part of the learning and not just the. Yeah.
[00:52:00] Speaker A: And I think we're all like. We've been teaching for a while now. And I would look back at. In horror at the teacher. I started off as, you know, and. And I kind of think about sort of the constant work, the amount of work that went into becoming a different person, a different teacher, a different instructor in the classroom.
And I think what the character education work in many ways is.
I think it's also as Grant said, not just for our students.
It's for the entire institution in many ways, to look at how we could become better faculty, better advisors, better staff.
And two, one, I'll even bring it down a little bit to the sense that, you know, I think you'll see if students have a more cohesive, meaningful experience in those courses in that first year, they. They persist. I mean, it's Pretty obvious that they do. And you know, since we're pointing, going towards the North Star, as Russell has sort of said, 70% completion rate, this, this way that we think of education and if we can bring that same, if you can bring that into the classroom and into the entire institution, I think we'll hit that metric easily. But it's a question of sort of, like you said, how do we, what would, what would it look like? What would be different about the student experience? I think we would have students who are more engaged, who are more invested in their learning, who enjoy coming to ACC and enjoy coming to class
[00:53:47] Speaker E: just
[00:53:48] Speaker G: thinking about larger aspirations to make this successful too.
There are a lot of faculty members I think are very scared and hesitant to do the kind of pedagogy that has made programs like Great Questions really successful. In part because they might exist within dual departmental cultures that just don't look very favorably on that or because they have an enormous amount of things they need to accomplish. There's like, you know, soup to nuts that got like a 800 learning objectives. You know, I hope that our project can help people, to help maybe departments think what do I really need to do?
Like, what does it really mean for a student to complete this class?
Is the value of, of the class that I have at one moment mentioned every one of these 800 learning objectives. I'm exaggerating. I don't think anyone has 800, but you know, there's a lot,
[00:54:39] Speaker A: you know,
[00:54:40] Speaker G: or like what, what's, what, what's. What's the.
Not just the essential skills. What's the essential experience. I want, I want students to have from this, from this coursework. I think that some of the things that I've seen with our Great Questions work is it helped faculty members, members get the courage to do something differently that they wouldn't have otherwise had. In particular with the work that we've been doing nationally, to the fact that there is a sort of separate non profit organization that is like helping faculty members do this. At other point they'll point to the national work and you say, look, we're a part of this.
I'm hoping that the character education initiative can help do that for, for faculty here too. So like it's okay for me to try this active collaboration discussion thing. It's okay for me to engage with service learning and do this thing out at a community garden in a biology class, or I can take my students to have this experience outside of the classroom or bring somebody in and spend two weeks talking about one thing that this can help give faculty the permission to do something.
[00:55:47] Speaker A: And we have to also, as faculty re examine like what we're doing. Right. I think we've, we've seen it over and over again the question of AI and you know, but I think it's what we have our students do.
And in order to do that, also the institution needs to understand that we need, we're incredibly busy to be able to sort of think about the fact that we have a grant that allows us some course release to kind of talk about these issues and work our way through it.
That needs to be also factored into the equation. Faculty are busy. Faculty are teaching a lot of classes, or you have adjunct faculty maybe working two jobs. The question that really comes up at this point is, I think, to Ted, when we have.
The fact is we need to be able to get people in the room together to talk about what they're doing and why they're doing it. How to kind of give them the space and time to change some of the things that we want them to change. Right. Which, which, which made me a better teacher. I mean, I would say took me 19 years maybe to get here. We don't want that for our new faculty, really.
We want, we want, we want to offer. We want to be able to kind of create a space the institution. And also, you know, we have to sort of think about like, teaching is a craft and it's something that's honed and developed and it has to be, it has to be done with support and it can't be done with the one off training that you can take. It is something that's ongoing. It requires a community, it requires people talking to each other. All of those things are what make things better.
[00:57:30] Speaker G: And you have to want to do it.
[00:57:31] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:57:32] Speaker G: And I think that with this thing, if you don't want to do this thing, don't have to do this.
This is not, this is not something that, that we want to, we want to make anyone be a part of. We're hoping that what we do put together is so inspiring and wonderful that more people will be a part of it than not. But it will never be something that people are forced to take, to take part in.
[00:57:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And if you, the other thing to kind of, to Ted's point, we don't know exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have this group of eight faculty actually develop the sort of model or work through these things, and we expect things to fail. But I think it's really important that you give faculty the space to experiment, try new things, and that's what we're doing. Doing here.
[00:58:25] Speaker E: Yeah. And I think, you know, it's interesting because that was, that was kind of our core struggle in grant development with our colleagues at Wake Forest as they were helping us through it, is they, you know, they wanted something more definite than what we ended up giving them. So I'm happy that they ultimately funded us because we resisted. They're like, well, you should get a concrete model. And through the whole thing, we're like, no, this needs to really, we need to set up a framework for faculty to develop this. But this really needs to be grounded in the faculty in the same way that I think that if you're doing. Because I do think there's a way people try to approach. Especially like in the K through 12 space, you'll see this character education where you're saying, here's what character is, I'm going to make you into that. Right.
That doesn't seem to be what, what really we're looking for.
So if we're doing this right, ultimately it's about helping faculty also learn to allow students to bring themselves to the classroom, express what they already have, and learn how to develop from that foundation, from the strengths, from the assets they bring from themselves, from their communities, from their background, from their experience. I mean, the great thing about teaching, and I tell this to my 4 year colleagues all the time, the great thing about teaching in a community college is that you have awesome students, right? And you have awesome students that you don't have at most four year schools, partly because you just have a lot more students who are older. Right. Who have some life experience, but you also just, you just have students who to some extent, because it's not this selective institution that is all about competition and performance and seeing who's. You've got students who are here to learn, right? They're here to do the thing we're supposed to be doing together.
They want to go somewhere in life. Right. It's not that we're just like trying to say, all right, let's hang out and learn for 40 years together and not do anything with it. Right.
And they're often. But there is a different character already to the community college student than in my experience.
I mean, it's superior to the character of the students I had at a lead institution like Pennsylvania or at liberal arts schools or at these other areas, because there's such a rich representation of such a real cross section of the community. We are at our best and, you know, I just like to come back to like, we had, you know, Kelly Tamphouse talking to us in the last town hall about bats to cats. And I keep coming back to this. He's like, your students outperform our native students academically.
And we've heard this from so many of our four year partners in transfer. And we have really good students.
Right? We have really good students.
So let's think about how we educate them, beginning with that. That our students are already awesome, that they're already bringing so many assets. They may not have the academic preparedness and the ability to perform in the exact way that the academic institutions want that would have gotten them into the Selective institute. I mean, many of them do. Right? They're here for other reasons, but for many students, they don't. And that's why they're here. But they have so much strength, they have so much vitality.
And so I guess, like, partly my answer to you is that they'd have an educational experience that says, you're awesome. Let's work together to make each other awesome.
Right. Instead of one that's like, oh, it's so bad that you're here at a community college, let's help you get out of this wasteland of education, which is some of the attitude even of some faculty sometimes.
[01:02:02] Speaker D: Yeah, sure.
[01:02:03] Speaker G: You know, sorry, Grant, you were saying about how. Oh my gosh, he'll come back to me.
[01:02:12] Speaker E: Okay, that's fine.
[01:02:13] Speaker D: Well, so getting the kind of a sense of the scope of the ambition here, There are any number of places you could have started. Right. So you're talking about some that could transform the way we think about curriculum, the way we think about pedagogy, the way that students interact with students, supports.
What is the first step that you have taken? What is the pilot this year for folks who are interested in learning more about it?
[01:02:38] Speaker F: Well, the Spring Institute, we had faculty pilot. How many people applied?
[01:02:44] Speaker A: 70. Over 70.
[01:02:46] Speaker F: There's a lot of interest.
[01:02:49] Speaker E: Yeah.
[01:02:49] Speaker F: And from that 70, we narrowed it down to eight that are part of this institute. And we.
[01:02:55] Speaker A: It was really difficult.
[01:02:56] Speaker F: Yeah, it was so hard.
[01:02:57] Speaker E: But we like you guys made. Because I wasn't part of that selection. You made such a good choice with the. The group rules.
Our main criteria was disciplinary diversity.
[01:03:08] Speaker G: Right.
[01:03:08] Speaker E: To try to get across the core curriculum in terms of the representation. And from there, I think we looked at other factors.
[01:03:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:16] Speaker F: And right now we're. For the first six weeks or so of this, we've been reading books together. We just read lost in thought. By Zena Hits. Now we're reading Aristotle's Ethics and we're just trying to get a common language and a common foundation about what virtues are and what character education is that we're going to build on.
[01:03:38] Speaker A: And then the second half of the institute faculty are going to look, look, I think one we're going to look at sort of how what we do in our courses helps students develop certain or at least practice habits of mind, expose them to that, develop certain virtues. And they'll be developing these toolkits or learning toolkits which could be applied across disciplines that help reinforce for some of these character so that the earlier reading kind of gives them a language and a kind of framework to build out these learning toolkits.
At the end of the institute, what is going to happen? I can give you the three of the plan is that these eight faculty, we're going to invite 16 new faculty to join these eight and we want again disciplinary diversity. But these faculty are going to be in these communities of what we're calling communities of inquiry, about six of them.
Each committee of inquiry would be led by two of the institute faculty.
And these six faculty, or these 24 faculty together would redesign a course, an entire course that they teach in the core curriculum, curriculum around character education or infusing character education into their course. So we'd have about, we're hoping to have any up to 24 courses that have been redesigned. And then the, then the plan is to sort of take those 24 faculty and do what we do in the liberal education advancement and development program where we have these communities of practice where faculty get together and implement high impact practices and their courses.
And that's sort of the, the next iteration where we kind of that scaling. Right. And we're, we're hoping to have about 400 redesigned sections.
And yeah, that's the end goal. So it sounds ambitious. It was ambitious when it was scary and terrifying a little bit, but yet seems to be kind of coming along.
[01:05:52] Speaker E: Part of what we're trying to do is to establish a proof of concept that things like what we've done in Great questions. What we've done. Labor's gateway. What we've done in the honors program. What we've done is scalable. Right. That this is something that can be embraced at an institutional level and doesn't need to be kind of tolerated as this boutique program that if some faculty want to do, they can go work on but ultimately doesn't get that institutional buy in. And to some extent we've gotten Institutional support, you know, at the, at the highest levels of administration. So I think that's very grateful for that actually.
[01:06:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:29] Speaker E: Because that, that is rare in our industry.
[01:06:32] Speaker D: If I may ask, what, what disciplines are represented in this initial cohort?
[01:06:37] Speaker G: Biology, Mathematics, Physics, Composition, Literary Studies, Government,
[01:06:50] Speaker A: Creative Student Development. Student development, Creative writing.
[01:06:55] Speaker G: I'm missing, I'm missing a few.
[01:06:58] Speaker A: Oh, psychology.
[01:06:59] Speaker D: Psychology, yeah, yeah, History.
So this is fantastic because, and maybe bringing the conversation full circle here, one of the things that really stood out to me and the article we were discussing a little while back is that it sounds as though you guys are committed to pursuing this through engagement with the disciplines. Not some kind of like derivative or watered down version of those disciplines, but actually having students interact with each of these disciplines on its own terms as part of a comprehensive education.
That sounds really exciting.
[01:07:34] Speaker E: Yeah. I mean the challenge I've kind of framed for myself and for the institute faculty is like our disciplines provide us with goods that are good for the discipline. Right. But from when you're, and that's really important in your majors class, you've got majors in your gen ed class. But when you're teaching general education, there's also a good, your discipline as a discipline provides for anyone seeking an education.
So I do think in our general education classes we need to say, what is that?
How do we focus ourselves more on what does math teach you that isn't just math? What does philosophy teach you that isn't just philosophy. What does it teach you?
Even if we don't want to go in the way of moral character, but even in terms of just intellectual character as a knower, as someone who, who, whatever we're looking at, all of our disciplines, workforce or academic, are about learning to be a knower, learning a type of knowledge system. So how does it help a student develop that? But, but not at the expense of or outside the discipline.
[01:08:45] Speaker G: Right.
[01:08:46] Speaker E: I'm not necessarily convinced that's, that's as bad a prospect as she suggests. Right. Because I, I do think there's, there's value to those educational experiences like in your background with St. John's that have really embraced a kind of non disciplinary, it's not even really multidisciplinary. But let's get away from disciplines in general education.
I think it's good to have experiments in both right now as we're kind of trying to figure out what this should look like for the future.
[01:09:14] Speaker A: I also think it's sort of interesting. Important too for, you know, especially in the core career, since these are general education courses. Is to kind of expose students to how different disciplines would look at one thing differently.
Right. So think of sort of a presentation I went to where the presenter brought out an apple and said, now a medievalist would look at an apple this way. A philosopher would look at this anthropology.
And I think that's kind of important for students to see in, especially in. That's kind of. That's the sort of broad exposure that students get in terms of what disciplines do and actually creates a respect for every discipline. Right. And for learning. And I think that's also important to kind of keep in mind, especially at the level that these students are kind of encountering our disciplines.
[01:10:19] Speaker D: For listeners who have found themselves compelled to want to learn more about or keep track of the project as it goes along, Is there a website or is there something that might look forward to by way of the institute coming
[01:10:32] Speaker G: up this spring, we will definitely communicate via email with the whole community about college community community, about the opportunities to engage with the character initiative in the upcoming, upcoming year.
[01:10:45] Speaker E: Great.
[01:10:46] Speaker G: We are working currently with students to design a website.
[01:10:50] Speaker D: Fantastic.
[01:10:51] Speaker G: And all of the things related to
[01:10:53] Speaker A: logos and things like that. Yeah.
[01:10:55] Speaker F: We do have a community conversation coming up in March.
[01:10:58] Speaker A: That's right. So I can make a plug for that. So we have Elizabeth Whiting, who's a character scholar from Wake Up Forest, coming.
It's a community conversation on March 10 at the Rio Grande campus. Food will be provided and information about that will go out as long as you rsvp.
But essentially we're kicking that off just introducing the college community to what the character education project is.
And so be on the lookout for that.
[01:11:31] Speaker E: And then we'll have another community conversation in May or haven't figured out the campus, but we're thinking East View. And that's probably going to be more having our institute faculty talk to the college community about what they're doing and get into conversation. But part of what we've built in is throughout the grant project is to have these community conversations where either by bringing someone in to lead a conversation or by putting ourselves out there, we're putting ourselves in conversation with the college community, maybe the wider community as well.
So I think one way is to keep an eye on that. But probably a month or two, we'll have a webpage, too.
[01:12:08] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.
[01:12:09] Speaker D: Very good. Well, I think that community conversation, which has always been really a fun event through great questions, is something that's going to be really exciting, I think, for listeners to attend. Well, thank all for you very much for taking the time to speak with me, and I look forward to seeing how the work continues over the next couple years.
[01:12:27] Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you for having us.
