The world as curriculum—Samantha Deane brings educational expertise to the Institute for Social Concerns

The world as curriculum

Samantha Deane brings educational expertise to the Institute for Social Concerns

April 16, 2025

Samantha Deane comes from a family of educators. Her great-aunts and paternal grandfather all graduated on the same day from the University of Northern Colorado with their master’s in education. They all went on to be teachers and principals. Deane Elementary in Denver is named after her great-aunts. Deane spent a lot of time with her great-aunts in their retirement at a gift store her mom opened. “Everything was about education,” Deane recalls. “Taking a message on the phone was a handwriting lesson. Counting change was a math lesson.” These experiences are what led Deane to connect with philosopher John Dewey’s notion that the curriculum is in the world.

*Samantha Deane leading Integrating Virtue Together session*

Deane is carrying on her family’s legacy by bringing her expertise in education and curriculum development to the Institute for Social Concerns. “I’m the pedagogy person,” Deane says with a smile. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about teaching and learning in K-12 spaces, in out-of-school-time spaces, and in higher education. I’m getting tapped to think about pedagogy everywhere I go in the institute, which is fun and challenging.”

With a Ph.D. in cultural and educational policy studies, Deane joined the institute last fall as senior research associate for Virtues & Vocations, which is a national forum for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre-professional and professional education. As part of this work, she implements the Educating Character Initiative funded by a grant from Wake Forest University and the project Integrating Virtue Together funded by the Kern Family Foundation. The goal of these initiatives is to integrate moral virtues and character education into course curricula across the University of Notre Dame and at partner colleges and universities, respectively. In this role, Deane also serves as editor of the accompanying journal Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing.

Deane’s presence at the institute is already making an impact. “Sam brings a unique set of skills and experiences to the work of the institute,” said Suzanne Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the institute and Director of Virtues & Vocations. “She has a distinctive pedagogical imagination that enables her to see the world as a set of opportunities to facilitate effective learning and engagement.” Shanahan identified the gifts Deane brings as a catalyst for Virtues & Vocations to flourish in new ways. “But Sam is also deploying her insight to assist with student formation across a range of programs at the institute and with formats for effective community conversations,” Shanahan said. “I love seeing Sam puzzle things through with a fierce commitment to continuous improvement. That makes work fun.”

Deane began her educational journey at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she received her bachelor’s in humanities. Jumping to the University of Colorado Denver, she then received her master’s degree in humanities, writing her thesis on the degeneration of democracy in Book VIII of Plato’s Republic. Her interest in education and democracy led her to pursue a Ph.D. in cultural and educational policy studies in the School of Education at Loyola University Chicago, where she wrote her dissertation on liberal democratic civic education and rampage school gun violence.

For Deane, this research is personal. “I grew up just a few blocks from where the Columbine High School shooting took place,” she recalls. “I was in eighth grade at the time, and my mom felt that I was insufficiently showing empathy or understanding. So the next day she took me to the school where pop-up memorials had taken place.” Deane vividly remembers seeing the cars of students who had died still in the parking lot and the flowers and stuffed bears and posters placed there by surviving students. “It was a walking graveyard at a high school for students who had just passed.”

Years later, in 2012, shortly after Deane handed in her master’s thesis on democratic decline in Plato’s Republic, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School occurred. This led her to the question of whether and how democratic education is possible in a society saturated with guns and gun violence.

Deane’s recent book Democratic Education in an Armed Society: Learning to Live with Guns addresses this question head-on. “Guns are here to stay,” she writes, “and we need to reimagine the kind of education that teaches us how to enact peaceful social change, e.g., democratic education, with guns at home and in hand.” For Deane, this entails comprehensive gun safety education in schools to help students wrestle with the question, Who do you become with a gun in your hand?

Before coming to the institute, Deane served as the director of the Formative Leadership Education project at Boston College. There she launched the journal Catalyzing Character—published by the Formative Education Department within the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch School of Education and Human Development—for which she also served as founding editor. In addition to publishing her book, Deane has published her work in journals such as Ethics and Education, Educational Theory, Philosophy of Education, and Educational Studies.

This semester at the institute, in addition to her work with Virtues & Vocations, Deane is teaching the Social Concerns Summer Fellowship, a course that prepares students for an 8-week immersive summer experience by exploring student’s vocational aspirations, considering the dynamics and drivers of injustice, and conducting original research in collaboration with their community partners.