From Journalism to Business: Cultivating Virtues through Different Disciplines at OU

February 2022

Last semester at the University of Oklahoma, students in courses ranging from quantitative analysis to Chinese language experienced syllabi that were redesigned to make intellectual virtues central to the course content. As part of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma, a group of faculty learned how to cultivate virtue through their disciplines and how to assess the new content.

“Last March we had an intellectual virtues mini-conference over Zoom featuring two keynote speakers, and we had a panel discussion involving two faculty from OU who had been interested in integrating virtues into their courses and had done it successfully in journalism at Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications and the Gallogly College of Engineering,” said Dr. Nancy Snow, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing.

The mini-conference was followed with four weekly workshops, also held virtually, that featured experts from a variety of universities. Two of the workshops were led by philosophy professors who study virtue epistemology and provided background about intellectual virtues.

The other workshops featured professors who had integrated virtues into courses in biology and religious studies and could discuss the process of incorporating virtue into specific disciplines.

“We followed up with a call to faculty at OU to integrate virtues into their courses,” Snow said. Eight proposals were chosen, and each faculty member received a $2000 stipend, money for supplemental resources, and ongoing support from the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing and from Dr. Hong Lin of the OU Center for Faculty Excellence and Dr. Felix Wao, Director of the OU Office of Academic Assessment.

“Our intention was to create a community of practice,” Snow said. The community included professors from International and Area Studies, Religious Studies, Civil Engineering & Environmental Science, Biology, Architecture, the College of Business, the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, and Journalism.

In order to incorporate love of learning and curiosity into his quantitative analysis course, Saleh Sahabeh Tabrizy, who is an Associate Professor at Price College of Business, redesigned his syllabus with feedback from Snow and colleagues. In the past, Tabrizy had used Excel in the course, but he decided to teach R, a programming language that fewer students are familiar with, as a way to encourage curiosity and exploration. He also designed a group project and peer review activities.

“The group project and peer review component spark curiosity by having students consider how they can make use of a library or set of codes, and then by seeing how others [utilized programming options],” Tabrizy said.

Tabrizy appreciated how the workshops last spring explained virtues in ways that were understandable even without any background in philosophy. He also valued the assessment tools provided through the project. He received positive feedback from students and plans to continue incorporating intellectual virtues into the course in the future.

Angela Zhang integrated love of learning and open-mindedness into her course on Public Relations and Society, inviting media exemplars to speak to the class and having students interview exemplars on their own. She and the students were both surprised by how often interviewees mentioned love of learning and open-mindedness without being prompted.

Jie Zhang, Associate Professor in Chinese Pedagogy and Applied Linguistics, chose to integrate open-mindedness and curiosity in her Chinese language course. She and students were delighted by how much these virtues enhanced the class conversations.

“Dr. Hong Lin at the Center for Faculty Excellence reviewed my syllabus twice and gave me very specific suggestions about how to strengthen the activities. Eventually, I decided to use the group presentation for students to cultivate their curiosity. We have a topic that we focus on, but for the group presentation I encouraged them to explore in any direction related to the topic,” said Jie Zhang. “In the past, for example, we talked about differences between Chinese holidays versus the American ones, and it was a very straightforward cultural comparison: ‘this is what Chinese people do, and this is what Americans do;’ but we really did not think deeper as to why people do things differently, and that’s the interesting part. In doing this project, I was able to ask those questions and students gave me very interesting ideas.”

            In several courses, feedback echoed the theme that not only were professors able to integrate intellectual virtues, but the process of doing so made the rest of their course content richer. Even without future funding, many professors plan to keep the changes to their syllabi and are considering other opportunities for cultivating virtues.

“It might be worthwhile to see if this can be implemented in other Chinese language classes and other languages as well,” Jie Zhang said. “I see from my experience it’s a very natural fit.”

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