Author: Mollie Ames

At Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., the word “character” was not always a positive. The liberal arts college, which serves a large indigenous population, was once a federal Indian boarding school, notorious for coercive character formation aimed at extinguishing indigenous cultures. Now, as it addresses its painful past, Fort Lewis College is centering character education within a reconciliation initiative that goes beyond atonement to institutional change.  

With a grant from Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.), Fort Lewis College is launching a Reconciliation Center — a campus-wide, interdisciplinary effort that values truth-seeking, engages students in experiential learning and problem-solving, and promotes the mutual respect needed to have the difficult conversations that lead to progress. Campus leaders hope that by overlaying institutional and individual aspects of character onto its reconciliation framework, Fort Lewis College will help all students navigate a better future.  

“If we are to move forward as a society, we need to do so with intellectual curiosity and cultural humility so that we build community and belonging — not just for indigenous people but for everyone,” said Mathew Schaeffer, who is the Fort Lewis College reconciliation coordinator, an alumnus, and a citizen of the Hopi tribe.  

Schaeffer recalls 2023 as a seminal year for him and for the institution itself. The state of Colorado had released a report investigating the experiences of students within the federal Indian boarding school system, which included Fort Lewis College. The school was established in 1891 as a cultural integration project in line with the country’s assimilation era after the frontier wars. The school, which closed in 1911, punished indigenous students for failing to abandon customs such as longer hair or speaking in native tongue. Part of their mandate was to eradicate what was considered the “bad character” of tribal people in favor of western, colonial mores.  

“We have a collective responsibility to each other and to all our students to tell the truth, to learn from that, and to move forward together.” 

Two years earlier, the college had removed placards on campus which inaccurately and harmfully depicted the original school as a positive experience for indigenous children. It was the first step in a process that led to the inclusion in the school’s strategic plan of a four-part reconciliation framework including: tribal nation building, language reclamation, health and wellness, and indigenous culture and knowledge systems. 

When the report on Colorado boarding schools came out, Schaeffer, who was then a student, was compelled to find out how well the reconciliation effort was understood and operationalized on campus. He conducted qualitative research on the subject as his senior thesis. His conclusion — that most campus members had only a vague understanding of this work — was presented to the then-president.   

“What I found was that there was an appreciation for the work people were trying to do in this area, but there was confusion about how to apply it and what it meant for their day-to-day,” Schaeffer said.

Paul DeBell is a political science professor at Fort Lewis College and was the principal investigator on the E.C.I. grant project. When Schaeffer’s research came out, he had been teaching a political psychology course with students who were interested in having deeper conversations across lines of difference. While the reconciliation work was more familiar to him, he wasn’t surprised that his colleagues had trouble internalizing it.  

“People would say to me, ‘You do political theory, so you get this. But I’m a chemistry professor, what does this mean to me in my classroom?’” he said.

DeBell added there were still pockets on campus where this work was done passionately, often involving students in experiential learning or service learning in the community. These reconciliation activities came under the purview of then-Vice President of Diversity Affairs — now President of Fort Lewis College — Heather Shotton, Ph.D. DeBell and Shotton had worked together on “difficult conversations” given their respective positions and came together again to pursue the Wake Forest E.C.I. grant opportunity.   

Funded by a large grant from the Lilly Endowment, the E.C.I. helps colleges and universities place character education at the center of their missions and practices in various and diverse ways. After receiving a capacity building grant from the E.C.I. to build out the idea for the Reconciliation Center, Fort Lewis College was awarded a nearly $1 million institutional impact grant this July to launch it.  Character education became what DeBell called “the common element among all these spaces.” 

The Inclusion of Character

“For us to be an institution of good character that serves Native American students and all of our students, we needed to be very thoughtful, respectful, and transparent about our past,” DeBell said. “Shaving off parts of history that make us feel bad is not demonstrating good character. But in the same respect, we also wanted to think of this as an opportunity for all of our students to build on their own character traits — to think about their own position in our society and the world.”

DeBell and Schaeffer agree that one of the most valuable benefits of being awarded the grant was the ability to name, frame, and communicate what reconciliation looks like at Fort Lewis College. 

“Thinking about reconciliation from the perspective of character development gives us a common language and helps translate it to people who might not see themselves as a part of reconciliation,” said DeBell, who noted even the word “reconciliation” is open to broad interpretation. 

For a school with a cautionary history around character, what reconciliation should not look like at Fort Lewis is the imposition of character. Not only does the Reconciliation Center recognize indigenous people’s standards of character — historically excluded from western understanding of the subject — it encourages students to explore what good character means to them. In this sense, the character/reconciliation work offers students a new avenue for self-discovery, empathy, purpose, and meaning.  

According to its grant report, the Center will “embed a Community Bridging Institute where students will work shoulder-to-shoulder with faculty and staff mentors to hone their dialogue skills as they learn to navigate conflict, embrace multiple perspectives, and move between western and Indigenous ways of knowing.” 

One of the key pillars of the character and reconciliation work at Fort Lewis College is curriculum innovation and student impact, which leverages the school’s asset as a liberal arts college with a deep learner-centered pedagogy.  Building off of a strong commitment to experiential learning, activities within the Center include undergraduate research projects with faculty mentors and an Educating Character Fellowship Program, where students and faculty will explore the intersection of reconciliation, character education, and personal meaning.  

The Center just hired its inaugural director, Rosalinda Linares-Gray, who will begin building the scaffolding around the Center’s initiatives and activities, many of which are already underway. The first step is to organize those efforts and connect the people who are involved, letting them lead the way. Having a home for this work helps further one of the initiatives founding goals: to foster a campus culture where reconciliation is understood as a collective responsibility.

DeBell and Schaeffer believe the establishment of the Center has already helped in this regard, and many of the activities within the project plan include the direct engagement of faculty and staff. But they believe the most effective way of gaining buy-in across campus, or across the country, for reconciliation work is to present it as a public good — a benefit to all. 

Asked if he worries how the Reconciliation Center might be perceived by political forces determined to root out anything resembling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, DeBell admits to having some concern, but only if the initiative is misunderstood.  

“We have a collective responsibility to each other and to all our students to tell the truth, to learn from that, and to move forward together.” 

In April of this year, Heather Shotton was named President of Fort Lewis College, making history as the first Native American to lead the institution. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

At a high school reunion this summer, I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned to see a well-dressed man in a stylish blazer with a shaved head and a few ear piercings. He smiled and introduced himself. 

“You won’t remember me. We didn’t travel in the same circles. I did a lot of drugs back then and was not known for making good choices,” he said with a small laugh. He explained that because our last names were alphabetically close, we’d often been assigned in the same groups, and he remembered I’d always been nice to him. He introduced me to his wife and told me about the company he’d founded (“I’ve gotten my act together since then”). As we said goodbye, he urged me to go home and tell my children that being kind matters. 

Initially, I was struck by the fact that he’d had the self-awareness and confidence to characterize his high-school self that way. The next day, I found myself wondering how he’d even remembered our small interactions, whatever they had been, and was amazed he stuck his neck out to say anything.

There’s a famous Maya Angelou quote: “People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Truer words might never be spoken about adolescence, a notoriously sensitive time when we’re sorting out who we are, what we do, and where we fit in. Along the way, we contend with all kinds of slights and stings by peers who are likewise figuring out who they are, often with elbows out. I’m guessing my classmate might have had more than his share of that.

Countless coming-of-age memoirs attest to the stickiness of cruelty during these years and keep therapists’ calendars full. When I was a new kid in town back in middle school, I was on the business end of some memorable comments. Not just sticky. Downright gorilla glue.

For many adolescents, those experiences remain more memorable than beefier slights later in adulthood, says Dr. Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University and author of hundreds of articles on development during the teenage years. I reached out via email and asked him why it is that the teen years pack such a potent punch. 

“EVERYTHING that happens during adolescence is remembered in more detail than are events, people, etc. that occur in childhood or adulthood,” Steinberg wrote back. “This is especially true for phenomena that have strong emotional correlates.” 

But what gets retained — good or bad, major or trivial, and for how long — depends on the kid and the adult supports who can help put things in perspective.

The science of remembering

Adolescence is an intense time, developmentally speaking. The brain is weeding out and rewiring neural connections at a rate not seen since early youth. This malleability means teens are extra sensitive to emotional experiences, both good and bad.

Adolescent identities are forming in a social Petrie dish with long-term impact. Rejection, embarrassment, and abuse don’t just cause pain in the moment; they integrate into the sense of self. Adolescents are more emotionally sensitive to negative stimuli compared to adults, regardless of the emotional intensity of the stimuli. The physical effect of this sting is actually measurable: Neuroimaging studies show adolescents have visibly stronger neural responses to social rejection and criticism than adults or younger children. Stress hormones like cortisol amp up memory consolidation, making painful moments more vivid and enduring. 

Relationships with people who provide a social buffer — mentors, teachers, peers who show empathy — can mitigate negative impacts.  

In this way, negative events can “burn in” more vividly than positive ones, a psychological preference known as a negativity bias. It serves us, from an evolutionary perspective. Remembering painful experiences helps us adapt and evolve at an age where parents are no longer a safety net in quite the same way. When you are a teenager, it’s important to know whom and what to avoid like a third rail. 

Remembering positive experiences doesn’t quite serve the same survival function. However, developmental psychologists say positive experiences provide a valuable reality check against the lasting value of unkind messaging. 

For positive memories to stick, teens have to have a mindset in place to take note of things that go well — and assign them mental value. That’s no small order. It’s hard enough for adults to drive a gratitude mindset strong enough to overcome the negativity bias. Expecting students to do it is like steering a tanker away from the rocks without a license. And yet the ability to train our focus on positive details is a critical skill, developmental psychologists say. Particularly for teens who are on the rocks. 

Helping young adults notice and name the positive 

Indeed, positive experiences can also be deeply encoded, especially if they follow or counterbalance negative experiences. Relationships with people who provide a social buffer — mentors, teachers, peers who show empathy — can mitigate those impacts and even rewire those pathways toward resilience. 

And here’s the hopeful side: Positive, supportive experiences can be encoded just as deeply when they’re reinforced and recognized. A single supportive adult or friend can shift a young person’s trajectory by providing what neuroscientists call a “corrective emotional experience” — a moment of kindness or affirmation that rewires the way the brain interprets itself and its relationships. Which is why kindness and empathy are so powerful in adolescence. 

Positive interactions can slip past unnoticed, especially for teens busy scanning the horizon for threats. Finding ways to draw teens’ attention to episodes of kindness helps strengthen the neural pathways associated with positive memory consolidation. In some sociological scenarios, it’s known as naming the moment.

A teacher in my kids’ own high school told me she routinely “calls out the good” because so often the positive can go over their heads, get lost in the noise. 

“They are so intent on looking for fins in the water that sometimes they miss the life rafts,” she said. “I have to find a creative way to repeat it when I can.”

I can only guess my classmate at the reunion became acquainted with this way of thinking somewhere along his path. His chosen field, and the company he established, is adjacent to recovery and the science of how we learn. When you swim in those waters, you come to know a thing or two about life rafts. 

To the Rev. Brian Konkol, religion and sports have a lot in common.

The college basketball player-turned Lutheran minister knows neither is completely “good” or “bad.” With sports, he might overhear vicious trash talk in the stands, only to witness high-fives, or a teary embrace, between strangers in the stadium parking lot moments later.

“It’s remarkable,” he said, “and oftentimes horrible.”

As dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University, Konkol wants to continue exploring the vast spectrum of morality sports seem to provoke and, ideally, tip the scales in a more positive direction. He teamed up with Jeremy Jordan, dean of Syracuse’s David B. Falk College of Sport, and together, they devised a character education initiative to cultivate virtue in sports by focusing on a not-so-silent and yet often overlooked majority: the fans.

Examining virtue in fandom is a novel concept within a very traditional discipline called “character education.” The rising field in the college setting focuses on helping students consider how to be better people, as opposed to just better learners. Efforts now underway include those at Wake Forest University, where the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) supports related programs at dozens of institutions across the country.

On July 11, the E.C.I. announced the latest winners of its “Institutional Impact Grants,” which fund large-scale character initiatives at schools over a three-year term and with up to $1 million. “Character Development and Sport Fan Engagement,” the Syracuse proposal, was among the 33 selected.

In the fall, Syracuse students will begin to see and feel the project’s presence in a variety of areas on their home turf. Conversations about sports fandom and ethics — the grounds for teamwork, leadership, and loyalty, as well as rivalry, aggression, and exclusion — will start to appear in both existing curricula and new activities, including peer-led workshops, game-day campaigns, and speaker series.

It’s an initiative fit for Syracuse, and for a grant with explicitly “institutional” intentions, because it plays into two of the school’s most unique and influential forces: spirituality and sports.

While Syracuse is not religiously affiliated, Konkol’s colleagues said his sweeping engagement on campus has made the multi-faith center he represents a core part of university life. His co-creator from the Falk College of Sport, Dean Jeremy Jordan, even described Hendricks Chapel as “the thing that kind of binds us and keeps us and holds us together.”

“That’s a real asset that probably people don’t understand unless you’ve been at Syracuse and I didn’t appreciate until I came here,” Jordan said.

Sports, too, are key to school culture thanks to not only the athletic offerings but academic ones. In addition to its Division I status and some top performing teams, the university is home to both the Falk College of Sport and Newhouse School of Public Communications, which offers a sports media track.

This summer, Syracuse changed the name of what was the “Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics” to, simply, “Falk College of Sport.” The shift reflects efforts to provide an exclusive space for the study of sports, as well as advance the institution’s broader leadership in the area.

“The chancellor wants sport to be something that differentiates this university and is seen as something that’s special here,” Jordan said.

With Konkol’s specialty in what he called “service to the common good” and Jordan’s in what he called “the power of sport and what it can do,” the two deans said the decision to combine their work was a “natural” one.

“Maybe we’re coming from different sides of the neighborhood,” Jordan said. “But we definitely have found a common ground that we’re excited about.”

Others have similarly recognized the potential in sports as a vessel for character education — the opportunity to explore moral, social, and psychological development in dynamics between teammates, coaches, rivals, and self.

The difference in the Syracuse case, and what piqued the interest of grant makers at the E.C.I., is the focus on sports off the field as much as on — on the fans, instead of just athletes.

This point of emphasis was of course intentional on the part of Konkol and Jordan, who not only love sports and prefer not to see them tainted by boos and jeers but are keen to engage as many people as possible in their work. “How could we impact a larger part of our student population?” Jordan said of their thinking.

In the end, the math was simple: “We have 500 student-athletes here at Syracuse. We have 22,000 students,” Jordan said. Whether that 22,000 includes more “hardcore” or “casual” fans, he added, the goal is to engage them all.

“Being able to include everyone in the project was really important to me,” Jordan said. With a more universal approach, he imagines, the initiative could give way to “new knowledge that potentially extends beyond Syracuse.”

After all, the lessons students take away need not apply only to their role as fans. Teamwork, for example, is one of the major virtues Konkol and Jordan will encourage participants to consider because, while modeled through sports, it translates to countless other domains.

“We’re all teammates,” Konkol explained. “I’m a teammate in my marriage. I’m a teammate in my work environment, a teammate in my community, in civic organizations.”

“I do believe that there is a way in which as a fan of sport, seeing great teams at work can in turn help the observer to embody teamwork in various facets of their life,” he said.

“I do believe that there is a way in which as a fan of sport, seeing great teams at work can in turn help the observer to embody teamwork in various facets of their life.”

Even as Jordan recognizes the limitations of operating this work on a single campus, he said the potential feels powerful. “I don’t want to present that we’re going to save the world. That’s not what we’re doing,” he said. “But I think there’s real opportunity to apply this beyond simply the two hours or the three hours that someone is at a sporting event.”

For students who study sports media at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, the character initiative will enhance training and conversations about journalism ethics already built into the curricula.

The director of the Newhouse Sports Media Center, Olivia Stomski, takes sports’ impact on fans very seriously. She began grappling with that influence when she was still just a girl and watched her single father escape into his nightly games, free of the financial and familial burdens that weighed during the day.

“Sports bring people that joy, and I always wanted to be a part of that,” she said. “But I also understood that it was a pulpit from which people teach others.”

As a teacher, Stomski is dedicated to ensuring the next generation of journalists realizes how every one of their decisions — from camera angles to replays to scripts — affects viewers. “A big part of what we’re teaching is understanding that responsibility: how media shapes the culture of fans, how media shapes the behavior of people when it comes to sports,” she said.

The funds from the character education grant will help bring new intentionality and accountability to Stomski’s efforts. “We are promising that this is going to happen, and I need to see evidence that we are doing that,” she said.

Stomski will also be involved in a longitudinal study of how students’ attitudes and behaviors change over the course of the initiative. Her role will be to consider trends in their sports media consumption — where, when, how much — in relationship to indicators of character.

Jordan said this research will be unique because it focuses, again, on sports and character among fans instead of athletes and also because it is a long-term, three-year study. “It’s exciting because it allows you to pinpoint the reason for change in the outcomes that you’re seeing,” he said.

To Konkol, a job well done will look like outcomes indicating the project helped students be more intentional about their values and virtues — to whatever extent. If everyone was even a little more thoughtful, the preacher in him can’t help but believe, life on campus, and beyond, might change quite a lot.

“Dean Jordan talks a lot about ‘sport for good,’” Konkol said.

“I say amen to that.”