Category: Flourishing

Following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, war broke out in the listserv for alumni of Patrick Mason’s graduate program in peace studies. 

Not even advanced training in conflict management could stop the former classmates from dividing into camps and hurling accusations back and forth. For Mason, now a professor, the vitriol was disturbing, but also “galvanizing.” 

“What it revealed to me is that it’s not enough simply to have knowledge; it’s not enough even simply to have skills,” he said. “This kind of work has to sink deep into your heart and soul.”

At Utah State University, where Mason teaches Mormon history and culture, the belief that mastering peacebuilding requires certain personal aptitudes has inspired a new approach to the field — one focused on equipping students with the character traits they need to be successful, as much as the tools or theories. 

This fall, with a $747,310 grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, U.S.U. launched a three-year project to promote, as its name suggests, “The Character of Peace,” campus-wide.

The project’s two primary initiatives include the development of general education courses to expose more students to “the character of peace;” and strengthening an existing program, Space-Makers, through which students trained in conflict management talk peers through life challenges.

For years, U.S.U., which Mason estimates serves a majority of students raised in the tradition of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been increasing attention to peace studies. 

In 2020, a group of U.S.U. faculty from different departments recognized a shared interest in peacebuilding and decided to create a formal certificate around it. Together, they identified a collection of classes across disciplines that covered conflict management and could count towards such a program.

It wasn’t long before one certificate turned into five. In 2022, philanthropist and U.S.U. alumnus Mehdi Heravi made a donation generous enough to endow an entire center dedicated for peace studies on campus: the Heravi Peace Institute. 

Now, students can pursue certificates in global peacebuilding as well as conflict management, interfaith leadership, leadership and diplomacy, and social entrepreneurship.

Beyond academic work, one of the funder’s personal priorities was to support experiential learning opportunities, like study away, internships, and foreign language training, that would help students apply their education to the real world. In a diversion from semesters abroad in popular cities like Barcelona and London, students of the H.P.I. head to some of the most consequential conflict sites in modern history. 

In nearby Preston, Idaho, a group visited the site of the Bear River massacre, the largest mass murder of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. military. Trips to Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Rwanda have offered similarly powerful insight into post-conflict societies, although in less familiar cultural contexts. 

Other activities at the H.P.I. include academic research, campus events, and community engagement. Non-students can attend conferences, workshops, and even entire courses in conflict management. 

In 2024, when H.P.I. Inaugural Director Austin Knuppe applied for and received a first, smaller grant from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest, the official foray into character education began.

Students of the H.P.I. head to some of the most consequential conflict sites in modern history. 

“It just so turns out in order to do that work effectively, you have to be a person of a certain type of disposition or character,” said Knuppe, a political science professor who specializes in political violence and conflict processes in the Middle East.

Alongside a team of interested colleagues, including Patrick Mason, Knuppe used the initial support from the E.C.I. to begin crafting a more formal framework around the attributes of a successful peacebuilder and how to teach them. 

The group ultimately landed on four key traits: moral imagination, or the dual compassion and creativity to consider undiscovered solutions; cognitive flexibility, or the open-mindedness to hold contradictory narratives; emotional attunement, or an awareness of the human lives at the core of any conflict; and reciprocal love, or the capacity to relate and, especially, forgive.

Another central concern in these early conversations about character, Mason said, was how to engage as many students as possible in the work. 

The primary objective has never been only to prepare the next generation of “peace professionals,” he explained, but to help young people across a range of degree programs with a range of professional aspirations become “better citizens.”

“If students only take one class from us, that’s okay. If they take three or five classes — if they get a whole certificate — fantastic,” Mason said. “We’re just really convinced it’s going to serve them well and serve our society well if we have more people out there with good conflict skills.”

For Justice Cheatham, a current junior at U.S.U., the original motivation to pursue peace studies stemmed from needing to tackle a personal conflict, rather than an academic or even professional one. 

When Cheatham started his first year of college, he was still struggling with the disappointment of having left early from his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had been stationed in Columbia, when he came down with a mysterious illness that forced him to return home and finish his service from there.

An introductory class during his first semester at U.S.U. covered conflict management and offered Cheatham a way forward. In a few sessions on interpersonal conflict, he gained a new vocabulary and skillset to deal with the difficult emotions he was battling.

Today, he is pursuing a certificate in conflict management alongside his major in communications and serves on the H.P.I’s inaugural student board. 

With general education courses in conflict management in the works, more students like Cheatham without prior interest in peacebuilding may similarly start to see its wide-ranging applications.

Junior Abbi Zaugg isn’t pursuing any of the academic certificates through the H.P.I., but she still attends events there. “I am just a great lover of thought exchange,” the double major in political science and creative writing said.

That’s the outlook that inspired her to join a recent conversation following the killing of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University — just a two-hour drive away from U.S.U. — about whether controversial speakers should appear on campus. 

“I was participating very, very heavily,” Zaugg said of her role in the session. Her favorite part of dialogues like these is being able to hear her peers respond to her ideas, even if they disagree.

The common narrative that Gen Z is unwilling to engage with viewpoints unlike their own indeed does not seem to apply to Zaugg, nor her peers who attended the same event.

Zaugg even wondered if today’s young people are uniquely suited to deal with conflict, given that “most of us have been in conflict since we were very young.” She called her nearly lifelong concerns about school safety “a normal fact of life.”

Justice Cheatham, who also attended the H.P.I. event, stepped away feeling proud of his fellow students. They didn’t have to show up to an uncomfortable conversation. The weather had been nice that evening. He knew they could have been hiking instead.

“I have a lot of faith in our generation, and I think we can change the world,” Cheatham said. 

Soon, students like Cheatham may have the opportunity to participate in change-making on the state level. 

Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who is a U.S.U. alumnus, has been considering new partners in higher education for his think tank, Disagree Better, to help advance programs for peace. The H.P.I. is at the table. 

The Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University recently announced a request for proposals for grants between $50,000 and $1,000,000 to fund character education projects at U.S. colleges and universities.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

The week Charlie Kirk was killed on a campus across the country, a group of undergraduate researchers at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Penn. used their Friday meeting to talk about peace.

To guide their conversation, they turned to the records of students who came before them — who grappled with different controversies, but ones that similarly shaped their young lives and emerging beliefs. In 1960s editions of Seton Hill’s century-old newspaper, The Setonian, these archivists-in-training discovered voices both in support and rejection of the war in Vietnam. They analyzed photographs of their predecessors in protest, carrying signs insisting “Apathy Kills,” as well as an op-ed from the bipartisan National Student Committee for the Defense of Vietnam, which decried its radical peers and their “irresponsible opposition to our country’s policy in Vietnam.”

The past may not be prescriptive, and Vietnam-era editorials may not offer a how-to guide for peace in 2025, but there are lessons to be learned from shared history. That’s the idea behind Seton Hill’s new character education initiative, of which exploring The Setonian archives is one key part. The institution-wide endeavor centers efforts to derive and promote the values and virtues the Catholic liberal arts university was built on. That pursuit, its organizers hope, can strengthen students’ individual intellectual and personal development, while uniting the broader campus in collective understanding.

Literature professor Sarah Marsh, who is also the director of university curriculum, began spearheading Seton Hill’s entry into character education last year. She was inspired, she said, by a growing recognition that the purpose of higher education should encompass “making people,” rather than simply transferring degrees. From there, the direction for a character project at Seton Hill fell into place, given the strong sense of institutional identity she said already grounds school and student life. “Many universities have missions,” Marsh said. “Ours is present in the day-to-day.”

Seton Hill’s lasting mission stems from its unique origins as a project of a Catholic order of women religious, the Sisters of Charity. This congregation was founded in the early 19th century by Elizabeth Ann Seton — the first American-born saint for whom Seton Hill was named — and was devoted to spiritual as well as humanitarian work, particularly in service of the poor, education, and medical care. In 1882, what became the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill purchased the plot where Seton Hill University now sits, using it to educate younger pupils before launching a junior and then four-year college for women by 1918. 

A century later, Seton Hill is a coeducational university home to around 2,000 students of any (or no) denomination, yet loyal to the Catholic social values that started it all. “Anytime we’re having a conversation about curriculum, anytime we’re having a conversation about student wellbeing, anytime we’re having a conversation about student life, we are talking about the history and the charism of the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill,” Marsh said. 

“You feel a deeper connection in knowing and understanding who you are, how you’ve been formed, and the people who have come before you.”

A charism, Marsh clarified, is a set of values or “spiritual gifts” that the Sisters of Charity, who are still active, strive to embody in their vocational life. For those at Seton Hill, these gifts are expressed by four pillars — welcoming, learning, celebrating, and serving — that guide their work in the world and the university to this day.

In 2024, the pillars took on new meaning when Marsh decided to make them the crux of her vision for character education at Seton Hill. Awarded a $50,000 Capacity-Building grant from the Educating Character Initiative (E.C.I.) at Wake Forest University, she assembled a team of interdisciplinary faculty and staff to devise a unique definition of character education for the university. The succinct, one-page document that came out of their year’s work outlines how each of the institutional pillars reflects different character virtues. 

The pillar of welcoming, they write, refers to the virtue of hospitality, which involves a “conviction of the fundamental, and therefore equal, dignity of every human being.” The pillar of learning refers to humility and wisdom, virtues that allow people to recognize the limits of what they can know, as well as their personal biases. Celebrating refers to gratitude for others and life itself. Serving refers to prudence, or the translation of wisdom into practice to promote good.

With the clarity of these definitions, Marsh expanded the project further, applying for a second round of support from the E.C.I. This one, secured in July 2025, is an Institutional Impact grant of $438,000 to convert the character concepts Marsh and her colleagues developed into practice. Over the next three years, this process will feature two main initiatives: incorporating a series of character education courses into the required curriculum and enlisting students to pioneer research into the student newspaper archives.

The added coursework will form a “vertical pathway,” Marsh said, with one character education class for each grade level. For the youngest students, the First Year Seminar will introduce them to the fundamentals of character education and the Seton Hill mission. For sophomores, another pre-existing course called Faith, Religion, and Society will be infused with character theory to, Marsh said, “make students more aware of the virtues that they are practicing as they work through the content of that particular class.”

As for the subsequent two, higher-level courses, they have not yet been realized. When they are, juniors will take one called Setonian Mission, offering a more advanced understanding of the institutional virtues and taught by interdisciplinary faculty. Finally, seniors will engage in a Setonian Seminar, which Marsh called “a liberal arts capstone” to consider the purpose of their education and its translation to professional life. 

But even as this coursework emphasizes the virtues Marsh worked hard to pin down, she is sensitive to the idea that they intend to control or limit students’ thoughts or behaviors. “We’re not trying to create a person who votes in a particular way. We’re not trying to create a person who worships in a particular way,” she said. “We are trying to create the kind of person who has made commitments based on an authentic and rigorous experience of some fundamental things that we think are true about being human.”

A key part of this work is to help students find out who they are and who they want to be; that’s where exploring the student newspaper archives comes in. University archivist Casey Bowser, who is leading this research alongside Marsh, said the newspaper is an ideal point of reference for institutional character because it is the richest source of student voices. “It really defines a culture of our community in a way that almost few other records do,” she said. 

Seven undergraduates have embarked on the archival project, wherein the first semester offers training in how to use the newspaper archives and the second lets them pursue an original research question about character. As the students use the paper to ask how and why character has appeared at Seton Hill, they are also exercising the institutional intellectual virtues, like the humility to accept what they cannot know. Moreover, at a moment when student interest in the modern-day student newspaper has been waning, they will consider how to refresh the content and the value of journalism more broadly. 

According to Bowser, engaging with the archives has already left her research interns more energized about the legacy of not only The Setonian but the institution as a whole. “It’s almost like your own family,” she said. “You feel a deeper connection in knowing and understanding who you are, how you’ve been formed, and the people who have come before you.”

That sense of connection to the past, Bowser said, has also been powering students’ express desire to do justice to the publication going forward. In fact, the research project will culminate in the production of a governing document to guide the future of the paper — by drawing from its history. 

“It’s meant to be a bridge,” Marsh said, “between what we have done before and what we are doing next.”

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.

When Hannah M. was a college student a few years ago, her mentor — the chair of her department — was, as she recalls, a thoughtful person who was also extraordinarily busy. “When I needed to know something about credits and certifications, she would say she’d get back to me,” Hannah said. “But she usually didn’t.” Hannah often ended up finding her own information about licensing or grants and making her own connections through LinkedIn. “I didn’t want to complain because I knew she meant well, and I had friends who didn’t have mentors at all.”

Mentorship has long been a cornerstone of youth development, but for young adults today, finding effective, supportive relationships is hit or miss. For mentors, meeting the shifting landscape of mentees’ needs can also be up to chance. According to MENTOR, a nonprofit national mentoring partnership, one in three young people grow up without a mentor figure, and those from low-income communities are even less likely to have one. This, in spite of the communication and technology advances today that surpass any other generation’s ability to make and maintain connections at a distance.

Jean Rhodes, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and founder of its Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring, has spent her career studying what makes mentorship effective. After publishing more than 250 peer-reviewed studies, she grew increasingly concerned that the field was stuck in outdated models. Despite decades of effort, the effect size of mentoring — the measurable impact on youth outcomes — has barely budged in 20 years. 

In response, she developed an A.I.-assisted platform that equips mentors with the tools, insights, and training her center has honed over the years, delivered to the palm of your hand. It isn’t intended to replace human connection but to enhance it. Rhodes describes the program as “rocket fuel for relationships” — a way to scale quality mentoring with resources at the moments they’re needed most.

The app, called MentorPRO, recently won the International Tools Competition for Higher Education, standing out among more than 1,000 entrants for its innovative approach to scaling relationships. It arrives at an odd juncture, a time when artificial intelligence is hailed as the zenith of information management, yet controversial for its role in therapeutic conversations. The fact that this advisory tool engages in both functions — information and support — is precisely what piques interest in the mentoring world. The question is: Can a tool feared to replace relationships actually make them more meaningful?  

A backdrop of need: The mentoring gap

Today’s disparity between the number of young people who would benefit from a mentor and the number of adults willing and available to serve as mentors is known as the mentoring gap. There’s been a worrying decline in “naturally occurring” mentoring relationships with teachers, coaches, and neighbors, which once provided widespread support. Organic mentoring relationships are based on rapport and familiarity, says Belle Rose Ragins, a mentoring expert and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, whose research makes the case that unless mentees have a basic relationship with their mentors, there is no discernable difference between people who have a mentor and those who don’t. 

The mentoring gap was underscored by statistics from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which reports that the number of 18 to 21 year-olds who say they’ve had a mentor has actually declined in the past decade — from about 66 percent in 2013 to 60 percent in 2022. And the mentoring opportunities that do exist are not distributed equally, often favoring those from higher-income households. The young adults most in need of mentorship — those navigating school-to-work transitions, financial pressures, mental health struggles, and social isolation — are often the least likely to receive it, the foundation found.

The Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring began to see that traditional mentoring had reached a plateau, with its measurable impact largely unchanged for more than two decades. Rhodes suspected the problem was rooted in the way we’re going about mentoring. Too often, she said, the friendship model — mentors provide companionship and a coffee date — is well-intentioned but inadequate.

“We’re still locked in friendship-based models that don’t match the complex needs of today’s young people,” Rhodes explained. “It feels good, but without training and structure, mentoring too often becomes mismatched to what mentees really need.”

This is especially true for young people grappling with major life transitions, as well as financial stress, depression, or trauma. Because most mentors are volunteers without formal training, the support they offer rarely matches the complexity of mentees’ needs. This mismatch is compounded by problems of scale and continuity: Due to constant turnover, cyclical programs and workplaces churn through new mentors without the infrastructure to sustain quality or deliver evidence-based guidance in real time. The result is a system that feels supportive but frequently fails to equip young adults with the structured, targeted help they most require. 

These challenges can stifle even the most well-intentioned program. At one large community college, for example, the executive director of its alumni foundation recalled a mentor scholarship program that, she thought, had a high potential for success. It was available to both women and men, highly motivated individuals with a G.P.A. of 3.0 or higher, and those accepted into the pilot were offered free tuition as well as a $500 book stipend. Mentorship was a cornerstone of the program: Participants were assigned a mentor based on their major and career interest and required to meet at least twice a month. Yet at the end of the inaugural year, only 50 percent of participants called it a success and opted to continue working with their assigned mentor.

“I was surprised and sad to hear about the results,” said the alumni foundation director. “But in the end, it’s like speed dating. It’s only as effective as the connection with the personality on the other side of the table, which is kind of a roll of the dice if you’re assigned to one another. Add to that the expectations a mentee might end up having, and unexpected needs, and it’s a total gamble. It’s almost impossible for the mentor to be prepared for all that in advance.”

A human-centered, A.I.-supported solution

During the pandemic, mentorship turned into e-mentoring by default, while colleges and other organizations struggled to stay connected with young people virtually. 

“The sudden shift to e-mentoring during the pandemic tested the capacity, professional skills, and adaptability of many mentoring programs,” concludes the MENTOR report “From Crisis into Capacity: Final Report on Findings from Recent Research on E-Mentoring,” funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “However, these rapid innovations also fostered a belief that e-mentoring is a meaningful addition to a program’s capacity and scope, and that with proper staffing and planning time, virtual program delivery warrants further scaling.” 

The Covid-19 shutdown made clearer the weaknesses that had existed in mentoring for years and provided an opportunity for virtual mentoring to step up. What virtual mentoring lacks in non-verbal cues, according to The National Institutes of Health, it gains in geographic flexibility and accessibility for a wider range of people. And that loss of in-person connection can be mitigated through intentional communication, use of video conferencing, and consistent effort from both the mentor and mentee to build a strong and supportive relationship

Rhodes began working on an A.I-enhanced platform that would step into the void, combining the flexibility of many modes of communication with the access to resources and best practices available through hundreds of pages of research. With input from her sister, a computer engineer, and support from the National Science Foundation, she designed a system that blends human-centered mentorship with A.I.’s capacity to deliver research and training in real time. As an app, it folds naturally into electronic communications. But it also serves as a genie in your pocket for information before, during, or after any kind of interactions – virtual or in-person.

MentorPRO was built in response to the shortcomings Rhodes observed in traditional mentoring. Instead of relying on casual, friendship-style interactions that may feel supportive but often fail to meet urgent needs, the platform grounds mentoring relationships in clear goals and purpose. By asking mentees to identify their priorities at the first interaction, the program helps mentors move beyond informal companionship and focus on tangible outcomes — academic progress, career readiness, or emotional wellbeing — that align with the challenges each young person experiences. This structure puts guardrails on the mentoring relationship and helps guide the partnership with growth and goals.

The first guardrail takes the form of weekly check-ins, brief surveys that ask mentees to share where they are thriving or struggling. If a mentee indicates rising distress — say, slipping into discouragement about school or career — the mentor has the chance to intervene proactively rather than react after problems escalate. 

Another key feature is the platform’s ability to capture conversations and data within the app, creating a record of interactions, challenges, and progress. Instead of relying on memory or irregular check-ins, mentors and program staff have access to a growing dataset that helps track trends, tailor support, and maintain continuity even if mentors change. This addresses one of the biggest weaknesses Rhodes identified behind the effectiveness plateau: the inability of programs to sustain quality as mentors (especially peer mentors) cycle in and out. With institutional memory embedded into the system, mentees don’t have to start over if transitions occur.

Perhaps most significantly, in Rhodes’ eyes, the program addresses the training gap that has historically limited mentors’ effectiveness. Instead of front-loading generic training that may or may not be relevant later, the app delivers on-demand, evidence-based training modules at the moment they are needed. This is Rhodes’ “rocket fuel.” If a mentee discloses trauma, attention challenges, or career anxieties, the mentor is immediately provided with concise, research-backed resources — front-loaded and trained on information from the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring — to guide the conversation. This “just-in-time” approach closes the gap between a mentor’s good intentions and actual capacity to help, transforming volunteers into skilled supporters without requiring them to become experts overnight.

Other resources synthesize useful information. Using retrieval-augmented generation models, the program scans prior conversations, mentee surveys, and local institutional resources — such as a university advising center — into short, actionable insights for the mentor. Instead of spending time trying to remember details or search for resources — like Hannah’s busy department-head mentor — mentors can focus on listening and active responses, equipped with tailored guidance automatically, without having to remember to dig later. Rhodes emphasized that the A.I. is not a replacement for human connection, but a delivery system for the research that can make it more potent. 

Rhodes emphasized that the A.I. is not a replacement for human connection, but a delivery system for the research that can make it more potent. 

“I created an 800-page training manual that curated all these studies and all the work that I think is really good, and I trained our language model on that,” she said. “It’s at the fingertips of a mentor right when they need it. It becomes this wonderful way to bring science and evidence into the conversations they are having with their mentors. And it makes relationships more effective without stripping them of authenticity.”

Beyond strengthening one-to-one mentoring, MentorPRO addresses another systemic weakness: the limited networks available to many young adults. Through social capital expansion and “flash mentoring,” the app connects mentees to short-term advisors in their communities — alumni, local employers, subject-matter experts — who can provide specialized guidance. This helps young adults build broader networks of support, a critical factor for career development and community integration that traditional programs often overlook.

In this way, Rhodes sought to address the systemic barriers that exist: inequitable access, lack of scalable training, poor continuity, and irrelevance to young adults’ real needs. By ensuring that mentors — not algorithms — remain at the center, while equipping them with timely, evidence-based tools, the platform helps bridge the mentoring gap.

The human at the helm

A recurring theme in Rhodes’ vision is the phrase “human at the helm.” At an age where bots have fallen short with disastrous results — say, reinforcing a youth’s suicidal ideation — the human at the helm has never been more critical. Rhodes draws a sharp contrast with A.I. chatbots marketed as companions. “Young people need to practice asking for help, navigating conflict, and building weak ties beyond their comfort zone. That’s how growth happens.” In this model, A.I. is not a substitute but a co-pilot — an invisible force making human mentors more effective, more present, and more scalable. 

While A.I. can streamline, summarize, and deliver evidence, only humans can offer the sacrifice, fallibility, and authentic presence that young adults crave. They can hear and support, challenge, and engage, with spontaneous pivots to humor and flashes of reciprocity and irreverence — because that’s what it is to be human and what is rewarding about human interaction. 

The MentorPRO platform is currently in place in more than 50 partnerships with higher education, youth development, and workforce development, ranging from West Point and the University of Chicago to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and City Year to Warrior Women and the National Guard Youth Challenge. MentorPRO users report that 92 percent of mentees voluntarily downloaded and used the platform; 94 percent actively engaged with it, and 87 percent said the resources helped them achieve their goals. 

Rhodes believes that structured mentoring — human relationships supported by scaffolding — can improve educational performance and workforce readiness, and wellbeing.

“Decades of research have shown that, with the right training and support, mentors and other paraprofessionals can deliver interventions just as effectively as professionals — if not more so — in ways that could help to bridge the substantial gaps in care and support,” concludes Rhodes in “The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring.” “Yet, there is a critical caveat: across all the studies comparing professionals to paraprofessionals, paraprofessionals were only effective when there was ongoing training and supervision.”

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.