Virtue-Focused “Character Education” as a Tool to Manage Contemporary Challenges in Teaching Sociology

• In Event: Teaching Sociology in an Age of Disruption

Abstract

Sociologists have faced multiple, simultaneous, and compounding challenges in the classroom in recent years from pandemic-driven online teaching to political upheavals to the advent of AI. Here, I will demonstrate how incorporating virtue-focused learning objectives derived from a character education initiative may hold significant potential for how sociologists can redesign and reconceptualize courses in ways that help us respond strategically to the countervailing forces we currently face. This paper will provide a brief overview of the goals of Character Education, how helping students develop “virtues” like attentiveness, compassion, or respect can be applied to common pedagogical goals (and challenges) in the sociological classroom, and share data from a successful intervention designed to cultivate the virtue of "attentiveness" in my own recent introductory sociology course.

Author

• Amanda Marie Gengler, Wake Forest University