Wake Forest University, located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is at the forefront of a national movement to incorporate character development into higher education curricula. It places character—and educating leaders of character—at the heart of its mission, driven by some of the world’s leading experts in character research. The university sees its motto—Pro Humanitate (for humanity)—as a call to action to develop and teach qualities that empower its students, graduates and faculty to be catalysts for good, acting in the best interests of humankind.

Character education can have an indirect impact on how the future unfolds and gives graduates the tools to be effective and ethical leaders, says William Cochran, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science and an affiliate of the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. “Character education is about giving students a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice and helping them to develop themselves in ways that are personally and professionally relevant,” says Cochran. It aims to foster ethical reasoning, moral perception, agency and decision-making, and virtues such as courage, honesty, empathy and justice.

“Character education gives young people and emerging adults a chance to develop moral commitments that can animate and guide them in their young adulthood and the rest of their lives,” says Elizabeth Whiting, scholar of character in The Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest.

Launched in 2017, Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character is an interdisciplinary initiative that aims to inspire, educate and empower people to serve humanity and spur broader conversations about the role of character in leadership. Through research-backed practices, rigorous evaluation and more than $35 million in grants awarded to over 150 institutions, the program is predicted to impact the lives of more than 600,000 students in the U.S. by 2030.    

Character education can cultivate virtues and alter students’ outlooks. For example, a case study on a course offered by Program for Leadership and Character found that character education promotes the development of specific virtues in students. An innovative first-year course at Wake Forest University, called Commencing Character, is designed to nurture the development of traits such as kindness, practical wisdom and humility in students, using evidence-based strategies. The research, which was published in the Journal of Moral Education in 2022, compared the self-reported views of 31 students who took the course and 49 who did not. There were “significant differences in the development of the targeted virtues” between the groups, the study revealed.

The Program for Leadership and Character uses seven strategies for character development, which were developed and empirically tested through rigorous research. They incorporate ideas from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and education.

The strategies include habituation through practice; reflection on personal experience; engagement with virtuous exemplars; dialogue to increase virtue literacy; awareness of situational variables and biases; moral reminders; and friendships defined by mutual accountability.

“Character education, and particularly the seven research-based strategies that we use at Wake Forest, offers a way to make theory more concrete and into something we can live and not just think about,” Cochran says.

Cochran has developed ethics modules that are embedded throughout the university’s computer science curriculum. Technologies such as AI are developing at an unprecedented rate and regulations and policies are struggling to keep up. “Our best bet for making sure that the future evolves in a way that is going to be beneficial for human flourishing is to equip the developers, the technologists, the computer scientists themselves with the moral skill set to be proactive in identifying ethical risks and take responsibility for making sure that the technologies they deploy are going to have beneficial impact and preserve what’s essential to being human,” he says. “Character education helps you to think carefully about what you want to do in the world, and how you’re going to do it.”

This model has now reached many types of higher education institutions in the U.S., from community colleges and small liberal arts schools to research institutions and national universities. The power of this approach is that it transcends geographical and disciplinary boundaries and can inform teaching practices at secular and religious institutions.

The Educating Character Initiative, which is part of Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character, offers institutions support, including funding and resources, to include character education in their curricula.

Every year, the university holds the Character Across the Curriculum workshop, which aims to help faculty integrate character development into any course, in any part of a college or institution. “It is a great way to come together with people from different disciplines, all connected by this desire to engage really deeply in thinking about how to deliver excellent pedagogy for students that will be meaningful to them,” says Cochran.

One of the goals of the workshop is to help faculty identify the implicit character development goals that are already built into their disciplines. For example, faculty who teach environmental studies inherently want to help students cultivate hope rather than despair in the face of environmental crises. Lecturers in medicine would aim to foster compassion in their students.

Character education gives faculty and students the vocabulary to engage with these ideas. “If you can be more explicit about what your character development goals are, you can also disagree more constructively,” Whiting says. The workshop empowers faculty to write learning objectives for virtue development, develop assessments that recognize the character-development aspects of their teaching and design learning activities.

However, implementation can be challenging in a time crunch, Whiting notes. “All good education requires building relationships of trust and respect among learners and between learners and faculty,” she says. “Finding time to build those relationships is one of the hardest challenges that faculty can struggle with.”

Cochran says he has learned to focus on specific virtues rather than giving students a thin overview of what it means to flourish in the 21st century. “For anyone who wants to develop a deeper practical engagement with the subjects or the disciplines that they teach and to live out the ideals and the ideas they lecture about, integrating character education into their teaching is a great opportunity,” he adds.

Success in character education is achieved when graduates continue to grow in their understanding of what is good and true in the world and live in ways that reflect those values, says Whiting. However, students are not the only ones who can learn and improve their skills through it, Cochran and Whiting agree. “We have a lot to learn from students,” says Whiting. “The best character educators I know are deeply curious about what their students care about most.”

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