Can Intellectual Virtues Re-Energize Teaching?

Usually, we can use summer as a time of recharge and rest, a time to revise syllabi and explore new readings to use in our classes. A time for digging into our research, attending conferences and finally getting to those writing projects. This summer, though, is different, as if we faculty were trying to do all this work while in the waiting room of a hospital, anxiously awaiting news about the health of our institutions.

As the headlines tell us, it is (past) time for higher education to change. Significant budget cuts, the AI steamroller and calls for more viewpoint diversity may mean that we will return to classrooms that are fundamentally different from those we left last spring. Stress levels are high as some of us face potential layoffs, challenges to our academic freedom and more. How can we use the remaining summer weeks to prepare ourselves?

Can we recapture a sense of purpose that transcends our disciplinary expertise and invites us to truly reflect on our role as teachers?

There is no shortage of course design workshops and lists of best practices for creating a syllabus. But where do we learn how to facilitate not just our students’ learning but rich, reflective and respectful discussions that may help them see an issue and each other in a new way? How do we learn to reimagine the possibilities of our classes to highlight ideas, not facts that are readily regurgitated by AI? How do we engage all students, especially those who are suffering, in learning to be more resilient, despite some pushback that will require us to be more resilient in our approaches?

These questions have lit up my own summer learning because they invite me to think about my teaching as a practice, one that indeed needs to be practiced to be effective in very different classrooms and with very different students. I am buoyed by Parker Palmer’s invitation, in his classic book The Courage to Teach, “to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require.”

Perhaps we are invited to model what we hope to teach our students. I have been thinking about this as I research the ways intellectual virtues show up in college classes. As part of a project funded by Wake Forest University’s The Educating Character Initiative and Duke University’s Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education, I am designing two courses about environmental issues that also help students practice intellectual curiosity, humility and resilience. 

And I am starting to realize that maybe these virtues should be at the core of my teaching approach too.

What might it mean to be an intellectually curious, humble and resilient teacher? Instead of armoring myself with the latest developments in my field, what if I recaptured the curiosity that led me to my field of environmental science in the first place? What if I paused to ask: What about this class topic captivates me? And even harder, but more important: What topics and ideas have I been teaching about that need to be reexamined?

Diving into research about how to teach about intellectual virtues (sometimes referred to as “character education”) is a refreshing way to think about returning to the classroom, activating our own student mindset. Thankfully, philosophers and others have developed a wealth of strategies that may resonate. For example, Jason Baehr at Loyola Marymount University shares specific ways to engage students in thinking more deeply about many virtues including thoughtfulness, which I’ve found to be helpful when considering how to help students navigate the use of AI, for example. The Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame offers a comprehensive introduction to integrating virtues into college courses, including specific strategies and assessment techniques.

To hone our facilitation skills, we can look to the Greater Good Science Center, which offers resources including activities to help students (and us!) examine their own values and sense of purpose. The center’s workshops for educators provide spaces to address the timely challenges we are facing with a community of people dedicated to the craft of teaching. Workshops by Essential Partners and the Constructive Dialogue Institute demystify the challenge of cultivating viewpoint diversity with practical skills for fostering respectful discussion on polarizing issues.

Reclaiming my own sense of myself as a learner has energized my summer work. I am actively wondering where I have been wrong and exploring stories of environmental conservation that are much more nuanced than the ones I’ve told in the past (a great practice for both curiosity and humility!). I’m working on a list of questions to inspire reflection and discussion in my classes, not just ones that require students to prove they have done the readings. (Examples of such questions include: “Can you describe a moment that made you hopeful about the future of the planet?” or “When have you felt pulled in different directions when considering an environmental issue?”) I’m also rewriting my learning objectives (again!) to include intellectual virtues, making them front and center in my classes.

And I know that I won’t get it all right when I return to the classroom. I’ll try questions that flop. I’ll have students who would much prefer a slide-fueled lecture than to have to talk openly and honestly with their classmates. I’ll still get emails complaining about my grading. But I am actively working to cultivate my own resilience, my own ability to keep showing up as a facilitator with curiosity and humility. I am preparing to practice what I teach.

Thankfully, there are communities of educators committed to this work, faculty from engineering medicine and many other disciplines, who are thinking deeply and creatively about how to integrate virtues into their courses. This work can restore our sense of purpose and get us out of the metaphorical hospital waiting room. Fortunately, there is still time left in the summer to recapture the joy of teaching and to keep our minds and hearts open as we navigate this challenging, turbulent time.