What does character education add to the educational vision of a community college? Though in the early stages of their work, Ted Hadzi-Antich, Grant Potts, and Arun John at Austin Community College (ACC), suspect there will be a fulsome payoff for civic communities, employers, and, of course, the students themselves. In short, everyone benefits when an access institution puts character at the center of its work.
Building on two ongoing initiatives, Great Questions and Liberal Arts Gateway (LAG), the team at ACC is reimagining the academic associate’s degree for pre-professional and academically oriented students alike. In 2017 ACC launched the Great Questions program to meet a college-wide “student success” course requirement. Great Questions invites students to join a discussion-based community where they study Great Books and develop the skills to speak clearly, read carefully, reason effectively, and think creatively. Beginning in the spring of 2020 with 25 newly conceived courses, the LAG engages students in learning to live an aware, meaningful, and informed life. Three years and over 17,000 students later, the data reveal that GQ and LAG courses outpaced traditional courses in student success and engagement. This was welcome news.
Reflecting on their conviction that society, industry, and individuals benefit from a well-crafted education in the liberal arts, both programs are built for students with diverse career aspirations. “What would it look like if employers in Central Texas started to value an academic associate’s degree?” muses the team. “In the current initiatives, which are aligned with the practice and skills of being a successful college student while building disciplinary skills, we were teaching resilience, being intellectually honest, humility with respect to truth, being respectful of proof and demonstration, and building your own moral life,” said Hadzi-Antich. “This is character education. And when students flourish, they will contribute to flourishing industries.”
As an access institution, ACC serves over 30,000 students a year. Many of these students will go directly to industries like real estate and construction. However, in Texas, there is a robust common core requirement, so almost 65% of students who earn a bachelor’s degree begin at a community college. This means that a significant focus of the ACC character team is building a character framework for all students, including those in career and technical training, dual credit, and general education. Drawing on their backgrounds in the humanities, Hadzi-Antich, Potts, and John think a greater emphasis on character will help unify the educational vision of an academic associate’s degree.
“We are building this for all of our students. We’re working on a partnership with the developmental reading and writing program, for this reason,” Potts said. “Moreover, the character model has given us an attractive way to talk to faculty in workforce disciplines and staff in Student Affairs. It is a holistic framework that is easily accessible to people outside of our liberal arts discipline. Whereas the liberal arts might feel tangential to welding, character feels essential.”
So even though they are building on liberal arts based programs, the ACC team is now asking questions such as, “How does being a good welder help you become a good person?” as they work on a more comprehensive campus-wide character initiative. Yet, that doesn’t mean they’ve strayed from their philosophic roots. When I asked about working with the pre-professional disciplines, Hadzi-Antich dusted off his Plato.
“[In the Apology,] Socrates, in his delphic quest, goes around to all of these groups, to the statesman, the poets, and the manual artists. They each know something. They each have a techne. Yet each assumes that because he has competence in one area, he also has a general competence in what it is to be a good person,” Hadzi-Antich said. Though they recognize the fallacy of assuming the whole is present in the part, he and his team begin with the assumption that learning to be a welder or realtor contributes to moral education, which the liberal arts can complement.
Though they are in the process of articulating their specific character model, thanks to their new grant from the Wake Forest Educating Character Initiative, a constitutive element is the idea that students ought to be empowered as agents in their moral lives. This civic vision is rooted in the belief that individuals, community, and industry benefit when students are faced with the question: how are you cultivating the good life?
“We have a focus on a way that a character model can help students learn the dispositions on the career side,” said John.” “But we are also civically oriented. As an open-access institution, we are not talking about civic leadership in terms of elites. We are talking about civic leadership at the ground level with individuals who will work and serve in the local community.”
On the ground level, then, they hope to create a cohesive first-year experience for all students at ACC, a degree program, and a framework for dual credit offerings in high school. If they succeed, the benefits will, indeed, resound.
