Month: August 2025

Beyond Expectations

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Donatus Nnani remembers being “utterly unprepared” for the first college he attended. After leaving school and serving in the military for five years, he decided to try again, this time at Austin Community College (A.C.C.), where an unusual seminar would change his life and his confidence as a student.

Nnani was one of the first students to enroll in the Texas college’s Great Questions Seminar, a discussion-based, first-year course in which students mine for meaning and relevance in renown texts, ranging from Homer’s “The Odyssey” and Euclid’s “Elements” to global religious texts and Chinese poetry. By design, Great Questions resembles a liberal arts class at any college or university, complete with students sitting in semi-circle and faculty strolling the room.  

“Great Questions was very different in the sense that it treated students as if they were already in a university setting,” said Nnani, who graduated from A.C.C. and went on to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of Texas, Austin. “You were expected to engage with and dissect this work on a level that isn’t always typical in community college.” 

Challenging community college students to reach beyond what is expected of them is an impassioned goal of the seminar’s creator, Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr., associate professor of government at A.C.C. and founder of the Great Questions Project. Educated at St. John’s College in the Great Books method, Hadzi-Antich believes exploring the wisdom associated with life’s biggest questions is exactly the right introduction to higher education for all students.

“We’re talking about big concepts and looking at them from very different perspectives,” he said. “We’re reading epic poetry and studying religious texts. We’re seeing the ways the questions are raised in different times and places. What is justice? What is beauty?” 

Hadzi-Antich’s effort to infuse a liberal arts pedagogy into a community college setting has become a personal and professional quest and, at times, “a bloody battle.” In addition to the Great Questions Seminar, he developed the Great Questions Journey, a pathway that applies a similar core-text and discussion-based learning format to a variety of courses within general education at A.C.C. Hadzi-Antich has also launched the Great Questions Foundation, whose programs include curriculum redesign institutes that train faculty throughout the country in the Great Questions pedagogy. 

“We’re talking about big concepts and looking at them from very different perspectives. We’re reading epic poetry and studying religious texts.”

But with powerful forces pushing for job training and skills-based learning over broad education, particularly in community colleges, Hadzi-Antich and his colleagues are working against a strong tide. And yet, they make a case that community colleges are the future of the liberal arts. They cite positive outcomes reported by Great Questions students, such as increases in retention and transfers to four-year institutions. Their biggest challenge may be getting higher education to rid itself of an unhelpful mindset: underestimating the intellectual curiosity of community college students.  

The Power of Questioning

Well before he created the Great Questions Seminar, Hadzi-Antich was fresh out of school and teaching a class on Texas politics at a community college. “It was kind of boring. It was boring for me, and it was boring for my students,” he said. To mix things up, he assigned Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” and watched the class come alive. 

“It was obvious these kids could read serious stuff,” he said. 

Hadzi-Antich never went back to lecture-style teaching but kept his head down amidst colleagues who followed a more traditional format. At A.C.C., he saw an opening to bring a great books seminar concept to the multi-campus institution within its required, first-year student success offering. But securing the opportunity to introduce first-year students to a radically different educational experience was hard-won.

“I remember some administrators at the time saying, ‘I don’t think that community college students can handle that kind of curriculum, and that just gave me this kind of righteous anger,’” he said.

First launched as a pilot funded by the institution, the Great Questions Seminar would be an alternative to the other required student success course, an educational psychology class focused on effective learning. A collegial competition emerged, and remains, between the tracks, with Hadzi-Antich believing that a seminar that stimulates intellectual curiosity by exploring life’s most fundamental questions is the obvious choice.   

“We looked at this and said, ‘We’re teaching students to be effective at learning, but higher education is about more than optimizing your efficiency in downloading information into your brain,‘” he said. “It’s about developing as an individual and figuring out how to live a good life.” 

The Great Questions Seminar pilot, which ran from 2015 to 2017, produced impressive quantitative and qualitative data. Semester to semester persistence rates of students who took the seminar were 92 percent, with 73 percent of students who persisted earning a G.P.A. of 3.0 or above. In a video for the Teagle Foundation, which provided a grant to support implementation at A.C.C. past the pilot stage, students referred to the course as “empowering” and “life-changing,” with one young woman saying, “I felt the courage in my own voice.” 

“You got to witness real transformation among students,” said Nnani, who is now the director of operations at the Great Questions Foundation. “Some people went from being shy, introverted, and not very confident in their ability to speak, coming forth with intelligent, insightful opinions. And more importantly, they knew it.”

Gaining confidence in critical thinking is at the heart of the Great Questions Seminar. Students consider ancient texts through the lens of fundamental questions they have about the world today. The inter-disciplinary faculty are not trained as experts on the texts but act as “engaged amateurs” to facilitate what is presented as a forum among equals. 

With the success of the seminar, Hadzi-Antich developed the Great Questions Journey, a pathway in general education at A.C.C. with redesigned curriculum focused on transformative texts and ideas. With the Journey program, students can engage in a discussion-based version of a variety of courses, including U.S. history, mathematics, and theater arts. 

“We’re trying to take these general education courses and make them as meaningful as possible,” Hadzi-Antich said. “We want education to be something that really matters to people, not just something you check off in order to survive in this economy.”  

To date, over 7,000 students have participated in either the Great Questions Seminar or the Journey classes. 140 faculty members have been trained in the standardized syllabus. The first-years that choose Great Questions for their student success requirement are more likely to transfer to four-year institutions.

For Hadzi-Antich, the most compelling evidence of the success of the Great Questions method is the fact that well after some class meetings end, groups of students linger in the hallway discussing the topic.  

American Spaces

In 2019, Hadzi-Antich founded a non-profit to receive grant money for a variety of causes, from food at student events to a fellowship program for faculty throughout the country. The Great Questions Foundation has become a national convenor for the growing number of leaders who share Hadzi-Antich’s belief that discussion-based curriculum should intentionally include community college students, a cohort who make up almost half of all American college students.    

Larry Galizio is president and C.E.O. of the Community College League of California, which represents one of the most established and well-regarded systems in the country. Even in a state where community college was designed as an introductory first step to higher learning, credentialing dominates. Galizio sees programs like Great Questions as important reminders of the original mission of community college: to provide a broad foundation for learning.  

“There’s been a strong push in the last 15 years for shortening time to degree and getting people on a strict career pathway,” he said. “It’s very well-intentioned because community college students are often time-starved with less resources. But I think anyone in education would agree we need to educate the whole person because you’re not going to be an effective medical technician or welder unless you also know how to work collaboratively and can solve problems.” 

Galizio believes perceptions based on class divisions exacerbate the push towards skills-based training over holistic education for community college students. “If you go to an elite university, there’s this expectation that your education is about discovery and you might change your major four times,” he said. “But at community college, the thought is these students just need to get their degree as quickly as possible.” 

Nnani’s personal story tracks to that assumption. “As an African American man, I was taught that education was just about learning the basics,” he said. “Things like Shakespeare and Socrates, that was for white, privileged kids.” Nnami said his success as an undergraduate and graduate student disavowed him of the notion that there were two types of knowledge: “functional knowledge for poor people and abstract thinking for the privileged.” 

The Great Questions Foundation is at the forefront of changing that mindset and rethinking community college as the ideal setting for the resurgence of the liberal arts. Hadzi-Antich is adamant that these ends will be achieved through the engagement of faculty, not the permission of administrators. The Foundation has trained inter-disciplinary faculty from over 60 institutions in the Great Questions method. The fellowship program, funded through a grant by the Mellon Foundation, provides stipends for 21 faculty fellows in six institutions to dig even deeper with in-person convenings, like a recent conference held at Miami Dade College.

Hadzi-Antich calls the fellowship program “the cultivation of the talent, skill, and passion to make community college the future of liberal education.” In many states like Texas, the majority of college students start out taking courses at community colleges, and younger students are pushing enrollment at many schools. Advocates see this as an opportunity to set a foundation for intellectual curiosity as well as civic engagement for a wide swath of learners. 

At a time of deep polarization, higher education’s role in developing engaged citizens has been called into question. Community colleges may well step into the void. 

“Higher education has a responsibility to help students understand their roles in a representative democracy and listen to the perspectives of those who are different from them,” Hadzi-Antich said. “There’s no better place to have those conversations than at a community college. They are simply the most American spaces in higher education.”  

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

Who Are You?

Posted on by Mollie Ames

In a scene from the new series Overcompensating, two impossibly enthusiastic orientation leaders address a circle of wide-eyed first years. “Welcome to college, where you can have a fresh start!” one proclaims. “And you can be whoever you want to be!” the second finishes. A third leader, disabled and in a wheelchair, rolls her eyes at them and questions aloud in signature deadpan: “Can you?”

The show’s protagonist is Benny Scanlon, who begins college with a quest to fit in and quickly learns it comes at a cost. His pursuit of social success leads him to not only hide his gay identity but perform his vision of what is acceptable — masculinity, straightness, wealth — in the most extreme way possible. The façade begins slipping almost immediately, as his efforts to imitate who he imagines everyone else to be battle against his instincts to be who he really is. 

For many in real life, the college experience offers an opportunity to self-discover beyond the confines of home for the first time. Even those who have lived independently before will find themselves starting fresh to some extent, needing to present themselves in a new place to new classmates. From the photos they put on their walls to the clothes they wear on the first day of class, they are cultivating, maybe even curating, an image of themselves — an identity.

Some will look forward to the opportunity for reinvention, while others struggle to determine who they want to put forward — and not just at the start. Either way, this process of identity formation is coming to the fore with the start of their adult lives. And it carries implications for wellbeing, especially as the developmentally crucial college years tend to coincide with the emergence of mental health disorders. With a strong sense of identity linked to overall wellbeing, the role of college as a laboratory for self-discovery may indeed be one of its most important.

For those approaching college eager to reimagine themselves, the relief could be immediate. Living away from the people who know them and the family, places, and activities typically associated with them may feel liberating. That’s the case in Overcompensating for Benny’s fast friend, Carmen, who’s ready to move on from her perceived identity in high school as a socially invisible “no one.” She represents all those who have wanted to shed reputations they view as having pigeonholed them: “jock,” “nerd,” “troublemaker,” or “no one.” 

Others may anticipate college as the place not to become someone completely new but to fulfill some part of themselves formerly untapped or suppressed. Unlike the Benny character, some LGBTQ students enter college excited to be able to express and explore that side of themselves more deeply. Beyond queer students, the general diversity on college campuses may offer those hoping to explore some latent background or interest — a spiritual tradition, academic discipline, professional venture —more opportunities to do so than ever before.   

The act of attending higher education itself, or a specific institution, can also play a role in building a sense of self. That is, being a college student or a college-educated person becomes an important identity marker. First-generation college students could derive pride from that new status, as well as meaningful connection among those who share it. At schools with certain branded reputations or key programs — a passionate sports fandom, elite academics, even widespread appreciation for the outdoors — students may embrace these qualities and begin to absorb them into their individual self-concept.

The pursuit of identity often stems from being drawn to a broader whole — to belong. Identity and belonging are like two sides of a coin, both connoting a sense of purpose and meaning important to wellbeing, though one is derived from oneself and the other from connections with others. The lines between them are also blurry, as people derive individual purpose from engagement with others and membership to a group. This is often the case in college, where students’ search for themselves tends to land them in communion with others: affinity groups, newspaper offices, Greek life. Especially for those from marginalized backgrounds — LGBTQ students, first-gen students — access to peers and mentors who share their experiences can be a key catalyst for identity formation.

Of course, there are tempting pitfalls in the process of seeking identity and finding belonging at college, particularly if students do so at the expense of who they know themselves to be at their core. For all the opportunities universities offer to explore new or untapped facets of self, dominant social forces may offer a path of least resistance: becoming someone acceptable but not necessarily authentic. In a new, potentially more competitive environment, the crush of uncertainty and insecurity can close in and push many to feel they need to prove their worth. 

There are tempting pitfalls in the process of seeking identity and finding belonging at college, particularly if students do so at the expense of who they know themselves to be at their core.

This tug and pull extends into the academic domain, where imposter syndrome is prominent, specifically among students accustomed to academic success who find themselves in the company of others equally proficient. The sense that their talents are ‘less than’ because they are no longer superlative can leave young people feeling unsure of themselves and the way forward. A similar effect may spread among high-performing students from marginalized groups who fear being perceived as undeserving of their achievements. Again, contending with how they see themselves compared to how others see them is part of the difficult work of becoming who they are.  

Identity formation can feel like an education unto its own, but if students realize later that certain turns led them in the wrong direction, that doesn’t mean taking them was wrong. Although some may arrive at college fully formed, assured of who they are or plan on becoming, many more will likely find identity formation to be an unpredictable and ever-evolving course — one in which self-discovery has no end point and builds from knowing who they are as much as who they are not.  For Benny and Carmen in Overcompensating, their valiant efforts pretending to be other people still leave them careening towards one apparent inevitability: themselves.

Good Sports

Posted on by Mollie Ames

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.”

What is “Academic Flourishing”?

Posted on by Mollie Ames

Tyler VanderWeele, Ph.D., has in interesting C.V. He is a social scientist, an epidemiologist, and a theologian. And in the world of flourishing research, he is somewhat of a celebrity. VanderWeele is the director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. The initiative aims to study and promote human flourishing and to catalyze knowledge across disciplines that intersect with key components, including family, friendship, virtue, community, work, beauty, forgiveness, religion, purpose, and meaning. 

The program’s most recent research, the Global Flourishing Study, made headlines around the world for its eye-opening preliminary findings. Among them was the collapse of the U-shaped pattern of flourishing, which traditionally indicates greater levels of wellbeing among young people and older adults. According to the report, it was the poor mental health and wellbeing of the Gen Z cohort that caused the disruption. 

This month, VanderWeele and his team launched a separate initiative examining flourishing among young people — this time college students and their role in what VanderWeele calls “academic flourishing.” He describes the concept as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of an academic community’s life are good,” including the degree to which institutions help students grow as human beings. 

The Academic Flourishing Initiative invites colleges and universities throughout the country to join in data collection and reflection in three areas: the individual flourishing of students, the flourishing of the campus community, and students’ perceptions as to how university life has contributed to their own formation. The last area excites VanderWeele, as he sees the understanding of how colleges contribute to attributes such as citizenship, character, purpose, and meaning as both innovative and, in some cases, controversial. 

In his office in Cambridge, VanderWeele offers coffee and conversation about the issues he has made the center of his scholarship and curiosity. 

LW: How did the Academic Flourishing Initiative come about? 

TV: Our working definition of flourishing is “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the contexts, the communities, the environments in which they live.” And while we’ve been looking at this at a global scale across numerous countries with our Global Flourishing Study, we do also firmly believe that a lot of the actual work of promoting flourishing happens in more local institutions. And from our prior reviews, we suggest four major institutional pathways to flourishing: family, work, education, and religious community.

As we’ve continued to reflect on how to promote flourishing in practice, we’ve thought that what we need to do is focus on each of these institutional pathways — on the dynamics that are specific to each of them and on how we can further strengthen opportunities to flourish. That led to work with schools and thinking about colleges and universities as well. On the school front, we partnered with the O.E.C.D. to develop a framework for metrics for education, for flourishing, which we’re also now working on operationalizing. But being embedded ourselves in an academic context, we thought we should take these notions seriously for our own university community.  What does it mean for an academic community to flourish?  It certainly involves the individual flourishing of the students, the staff, and the faculty which involves our established flourishing assessments — happiness and health and meaning and relationships and character and financial security.

But the flourishing of the community is more than that. It is also about good relationships within the community, proficient leadership, healthy structures and practices in place to help sustain the community with a sense of belonging and a common mission. To that end, we’ve taken our community wellbeing measure and adapted it for university context. But then we also thought, let’s turn to the mission and vision statements of colleges and universities and see how they reflect on their own understanding of themselves.

“Let’s turn to the mission and vision statements of colleges and universities and see how they reflect on their own understanding of themselves.”

You see pretty consistent themes, especially in research universities, related to the generation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. But you also see, very regularly, notions of student formation — that institutions are here to help shape citizen leaders of the future, to help develop students who can contribute in important ways to society, to develop leaders who have creative capacities to address, in an ethical manner, some of society’s most challenging problems.

And we started thinking, Well, if we’re going to take the mission of these institutions seriously, we should start by assessing whether these beautiful, grand, important aspirations are, in fact, being achieved. Perhaps we can begin by asking students whether they think they’ve been shaped in these ways as part of their university or college experience. Has the university helped them to grow in wisdom and justice and leadership and capacities to work across difference — in addition to, of course, developing knowledge and capacities for critical thinking? It was those sorts of considerations that really led to this work and what we’re calling “academic flourishing.”

LW:  What is your pitch to institutions on why they should participate?   

TV: Essentially, we’re saying that the data collection that is typically taking place — often on retention rates and academic performance, job placement and salaries, mental health, experiences of bias and discrimination — is generally good. This is important work that should be done. But students who come to universities, and parents who send their children to universities — indeed, the universities themselves — often aspire to more. And if that’s the case, why aren’t we doing assessments on these other matters: whether there has been a growth in wisdom; whether they have greater capacity to think critically; whether they have been prepared for leadership; whether this has helped them to clarify their life purpose and define meaning? Students want this. If parents want this, and if universities and colleges aspire to this, let’s collect the data.

This is not being presented as an alternative to what colleges and universities are already doing, but rather as a supplement. And if colleges and universities don’t want to do that, then so be it. But what we’ve seen is that a number of them do, and so this is just an invitation to do so.

LW: In terms of the invitation to the colleges and universities, what exactly are you inviting them to do? How do you engage with them?

TV: We’re inviting them to participate both in assessment and data collection campus-wide, and then also to join a community of practice with other colleges and universities that are doing similar data collection. The idea is to reflect on the data, to try to understand it, and to try to work out together what the best ways forward are. How do you address the weaknesses as well as the strengths within a particular institution?

The heart of this academic flourishing survey is focused on — again — first, the individual flourishing of the students; second, the student’s assessments of whether the university or college is flourishing as a community; and third — and this is the real innovation — the students’ perceptions of the contribution of university life to their own development: to their growth and knowledge and critical thinking, yes, but also to their moral formation and character development and their capacities for leadership and citizenship, and their ability to find meaning and growth in the process of their college experience.

And so we’ve included 24 of these student formation questions, in addition to the individual flourishing and the community wellbeing questions. Universities are being invited to collect this data, and we have an automated Qualtrics survey to do this in a very straightforward manner. And we’ve now set up infrastructure to immediately convert that survey into a report for the individual school. And then that data will be used in a much larger database to try to understand dynamics across schools and universities. In addition, we’ll be hosting meetings and events to discuss the similarities and differences across institutions. If one university has a particular strength, we’ll talk about how this came about. How can the other universities strengthen in this regard?

LW: Do you get push back from people saying that flourishing and this student formation work is outside of the scope of higher education?

TV: In our academic paper, we include a principle with regard to the appropriate scope of efforts for flourishing in education. And we would agree that it’s not the school’s or the university’s responsibility to sustain all aspects of a student’s flourishing. This requires families. This requires neighborhoods. This requires workplaces. This requires religious communities. You can’t make the school responsible for everything, and they’re not equipped to do so.

On the other hand, just to say education is only about vocational career preparation seems too narrow because you have these extraordinary narratives — anecdotes — about transformative experiences. There’s real potential there, and we don’t want to restrict that potential. We’ve said what we’ve proposed is that the proper scope of educational efforts oriented towards flourishing concerns those aspects of flourishing around which societal consensus can be attained and for which educational leaders and staff and faculty are prepared to address.

LW: What has been the reaction to the student formation work?

TV: Different institutions each have a very different focus, and that needs to be acknowledged. We have divided the student formation questions into these four domains: knowledge and critical thinking, character formation, citizenship and leadership, and then meaning and growth. Not all of these aspects of student formation will necessarily be of interest to all institutions.

We think pretty much any college would be interested in increasing cognitive capacities and knowledge, so those we feel are always core. What we’ve also argued is, even for institutions that don’t embrace character formation as part of their mission, some of this is necessary to accomplish the cognitive and epistemic goals of their institutions. You need a certain level of perseverance to work through difficulties and to push one’s mind. You need a certain level of courage to work through controversial or challenging questions. And you need honesty in test-taking and research practices. We need justice and patience to be able to hear different perspectives we might not like.

I think everyone would agree on a lot of this. Take courage. Do we want our students to be cowardly? Let’s get a show of hands amongst the trustees and the faculty — who wants our students to be cowardly? What about honesty? Who wants our students to be dishonest? What about your practical wisdom? Who wants our students to be foolish? You’re just not going to get many takers. There’s a lot of individual character strengths that I think we can agree are important.

A number of colleges and universities have real visions of flourishing for their students, and that includes meaning and growth. Different institutions may place different weights on these various aspects of student formation, and we are not trying to be prescriptive. What we’re saying is, collect the data and hopefully your strengths align with where your primary areas of focus are. And if not, then it’s time to work on it.

LW: Do you find that schools are interested in flourishing because of the mental health association?

TV: Yes, I think there may be interest in flourishing because of mental health concerns, but we are trying to broaden beyond this. I think there may be roughly equal interest in the flourishing of the students and in these student formation questions. We’ve been leading with student formation as the real innovation here because there are other universities collecting wellbeing data. But all these aspects are related. I do think the mental health and wellbeing crisis amongst youth has gotten much of society to take these matters more seriously and to reflect upon them. What are the sources of that decline? I do think one of the sources is a lack of meaning, a lack of purpose. This is evident in surveys as well, when asking younger adults and students: What do they long for? What are they seeking? I think meaning is increasingly a common theme there.

LW: Four of your student formation questions are included in the Wall Street Journal college rankings. What does that indicate?

TV: We are certainly pleased that they would take these matters seriously, but we’ll let the college and university rankings folks continue their work. We are, however, going to try to use this data collection with the Wall Street Journal to launch the movement, but our goal after this is not to directly participate in any sort of ranking endeavors. We are focusing on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each institution, rather than comparing them. What can you be proud of and perhaps use in your marketing materials? Where are areas for growth, which you may not put in your marketing materials but want to work on internally? And then what do you learn from other institutions that may have different strengths and weaknesses than you?

LW: What’s next for the Academic Flourishing Initiative?

TV: We’re just starting out, and we’re focused on students. But as discussed in the academic piece, ultimately, if we’re talking about the flourishing of a community, that includes faculty and staff as well. So that’s another direction we would like to eventually go. We’d also like to look at alumni and parents. I think employers would be another interesting aspect of this. But we needed to begin somewhere, and students seem to be the right place to being.

A Recipe for Growth and Love

Posted on by Mollie Ames

If you asked people to describe the Healing Meals Community Project, you might get different answers. For families experiencing a health crisis, it is a lifeline of nutritious, medically tailored meals delivered with a personal note of support. For the high school students who prepare the food, and write the notes, it is a unique opportunity to serve others, while discovering the good in themselves. Perhaps the best way to describe Healing Meals is as an organization that leverages the powerful relationship between food, health, and community. 

“We want everyone who comes through our doors to feel better when they leave and bring that energy to the next person they come in contact with,” Sarah Leathers, the C.E.O. of Healing Meals, said at its annual fundraiser in June.  

According to the Healing Meals team, that positivity is baked into every meal they make; and, they say, their clients can taste it. As a healing protocol for patients dealing with a serious illness, the organization prepares and delivers meals to families in Connecticut’s Hartford, Middlesex, and Litchfield Counties. Eighty percent of those who receive the food are eligible to do so for free. All of it is organic, locally sourced, and nutritious, aimed at nourishing patients with medical conditions and/or limited diets.

Healing Meals is among a growing national community dedicated to “food as medicine,” meaning they advocate for food-based interventions in health care. Research shows that tailoring meals to meet a client’s specific medical diagnosis leads to positive outcomes in health and satisfaction for people with severe, complex, and/or chronic illnesses. But anyone who has been in the Healing Meals kitchen, or worked in the gardens, or delivered meals to families, knows that this work is not just about food. 

As part of its model, Healing Meals enlists teenage volunteers who show up daily, put their phones aside, and help grow, cook and prepare the food under the supervision of a chef and other adult mentors. Part experiential learning, part youth empowerment, the program lets students learn about the relationship between food and health, become an integral part of a kitchen crew, and, often, gain meaning, agency and belonging.  

“From the moment I walked in, I felt instantly welcomed,” said Ben, a rising high school senior who is interning at Healing Meals this summer. “All of the other volunteers were just incredibly helpful to me. It was nothing I had really felt before.”

Since its founding in 2016, Healing Meals has engaged 700 youth volunteers, the majority of whom stay beyond their first experience. Leathers said while the organization’s dual mission – supporting clients and students alike — can be challenging for donors to categorize, the success of the youth development program has taught her that one purpose often serves another. At a time when 40 percent of high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, Healing Meals is becoming a model for a different kind of youth volunteerism, where the kids that are helping others may be getting far more in return.  

Organic Roots

The Healing Meals story began in California, where Leathers’ sister, Cathryn Couch, was running a similar organization called Ceres Community Project. Now serving more than 2,500 clients throughout Northern California, Ceres also has a youth development component, though Couch said its inclusion was somewhat serendipitous.  

As a well-known caterer in the Bay Area, Couch was asked by a friend to give her daughter a volunteer job for the summer. At the time, she was helping a woman undergoing cancer treatment with medically tailored meals for herself and her family. Realizing the growing need for this kind of support within her community — and witnessing the empathy and confidence her young intern was gaining — Couch put it all together, gave up her successful catering business, and launched Ceres. 

“It addressed so many needs in the community and so many things I care deeply about,” she wrote in her origin story on the organization’s web site. “Young people would learn to cook. People who needed healing food would have it. We would help teach people about the link between what we eat and our health. And we’d help restore the idea of caring for our neighbors, something that has been lost between my parent’s generation and my own.”

Leathers had long hoped to launch something similar in Connecticut, where the sisters were raised. Having experienced a personal health crisis in 2011, she began studying the link between nutrition and health and the relationship between the mind, body and spirit. But she had also been a tutor to students with disabilities and a job coach to young people, including boys who hadn’t finished high school and were preparing to enter the construction field. Leathers, who is an engineer by training, built the Healing Meals model with these experiences as scaffolding.

“No matter where you come from or what your story is, every young person deserves to feel seen, valued, and supported,” she said. “We all need someone who genuinely cares and who helps us grow with accountability and love.”

The opportunity to mentor youth volunteers as part of the food-as-medicine model was particularly appealing to Leathers’ co-founder, Ellen Palmer. A certified holistic health and life coach, Palmer had worked with teenagers and young adults with stress and anxiety. Yes, the students would provide a valuable service, but they would also have an opportunity to contribute to something meaningful, away from the pressure of college prep and social media.

“Young people need a place to go where they can feel worthy and learn about themselves,” said Palmer, who was with the organization until 2023.

In November 2015, Leathers and Palmer went to California with their other two co-founders Ellen Deutsch and Emily Safino to complete the Ceres affiliate training course. They launched the Healing Meals Community Project from a dining room table and used a borrowed kitchen for the first year. From an event posted on Facebook, they got a handful of adult volunteers, their first four clients and $50,000 in initial funding. That funding has grown to over $1.4 million per year from people and organizations who have touched, or are touched by, the Healing Meals mission.

“The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them: ‘You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.'”

Cook. Breathe. Grow.

Nine years and more than 218,000 meals later, Healing Meals now has an industrial kitchen inside what was a former golf club, sitting at the bottom of a low mountain range in Simsbury, Conn. There are organic gardens and free-range chickens out on the grounds. The students come in just after school and grab their aprons. But before they get to work preparing whatever meal the chef has planned for the day, they enter a circle, hear from a recent client, and giggle through the icebreaker.

Questions in circle range from “What animal would you want to be?” to “What does Healing Meals mean to you?” Most of the kids start out as strangers, some frightened to socialize beyond screens and across differences. But Palmer said the immediacy of the task before them accelerates a special connection.

“There’s a level setting that goes on in the Healing Meals kitchen,” she said.  “We’re all in it together. Someone is chopping vegetables. Someone is mopping the floor. Someone is working on a recipe. Somebody else is taking out the garbage.” 

Executive Chef Joe Bucholz with student volunteers. Via Healing Meals.

Joe Bucholz is Healing Meals’ executive chef.  He said there are major differences between his current workplace and the upscale restaurant kitchen he used to run, particularly around command and control. “I do a lot of supervising, a lot of coaching, a lot of connecting,” he said. “But I’m not actually cooking the food.”  He said he is always surprised when he hears parents say, “In our house, you are famous.”

At Healing Meals, the students are involved in food and nutrition in a number of ways. Their shifts often begin with a lesson about what they are preparing, where it is sourced, why it is being used. They are invited to eat what they cook and provide suggestions on how it can be improved or scaled. The adults in the room are there to coax the learning, whether by teaching the volunteers how to gather herbs or asking them to improvise when they’ve run out of cilantro. While there are many important protocols to follow, and safety guardrails strongly enforced, the message the youth receive is “We trust you.”

“The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them,” said Palmer. “’You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.’”

After preparing and packaging meals, students sit down and write individual notes to each person the organization serves. The kids are encouraged to share positive thoughts and whatever is on their minds. Instead of “Get well soon,” the notes might say “It was such a beautiful day in the garden” or “I really enjoyed making these enchiladas for you.”

“It’s great to see how much they love this part,” said Leathers. “A lot of times, the clients write back, and that makes them feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, they cared about my card.’” Just outside the Healing Meals kitchen is a wall with hundreds of notes the students have received. 

While much of the volunteer experience unfolds organically, leadership and confidence are intentionally nurtured at Healing Meals. Students earn a Blue Apron after 50 hours of service and a Chef’s Coat after 100 hours. This final designation comes with an invitation to join the youth development committee, for which students meet regularly and contribute ideas and feedback that have led to enhancements in the program.

Addie, who will be leaving for college in the fall, has been volunteering at Healing Meals for three years. She was recently invited to join the board as a junior member. She said that, since starting at Healing Meals, her perspective on the work has flipped from “something that would be good on my resume that I should probably do”  to “an unbelievable experience that would also be good on my resume.” 

“I feel like people are motivated by what looks good or what their parents tell them to do. But for me, getting my Chef’s Coat, joining the development committee and then the board, these were things I worked for, I wanted for myself, that I’m proud of.” 

Leathers said the difference between students like Addie and those who have been “voluntold,” as she calls it, can be seen in the number of them who stay on. Eighty-five to 90 percent of the students that volunteer at Healing Meals continue with the program, whether they complete 20 hours or achieve 300. Leathers believes that what keeps the students coming back is the direct impact they have on the lives of the people they serve. 

“There aren’t a lot of volunteer opportunities for kids that can provide that,” she said.

“I still remember my favorite story that was shared in circle,” Addie said. “It was about a client who had come to the Healing Meals facility to visit, and she had noticed our wall of hearts, titled ‘Client Wall.’ She had asked if her name would be up there, and she was told to go see for herself. When she had found her name written in a heart, she had broken down in tears. She had felt so loved. In that moment, I really felt my impact. I had played a part in making this woman feel loved, something I never want to stop doing.”

Healing Minds

In addition to regular check-ins, Healing Meals surveys its students about the impact of their experiences. Increasingly, they have reported improvements to their emotional and mental health. In an email to Leathers, one parent wrote of her son, “He has reduced anxiety, reduced stress, increased confidence, increased social interactions and increased trust in others. He has since joined a sport and a club at school with his new-found bravery.”

Leathers sees this qualitative data as too powerful to ignore at a time when the adolescent and young adult mental health crisis continues to confound parents and educators. Indeed, there is ample evidence in the literature as to the benefits of service work on the mental health of young people, particularly through programs like Healing Meals which involve reflection on purpose and meaning.

Additionally, Leathers believes the palpable feeling of inter-generational connection at Healing Meals can be an anecdote to the unprecedented rates of loneliness youth are reporting and Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy deemed “an epidemic.” 

Leathers is confident that as the organization expands to meet the increasing demand for medically tailored meals, the youth development program will grow, too. She has plans to open a new youth program in Hartford, Conn. in 2026 and looks forward to expanding in other parts of the state.

This summer, Healing Meals has launched its first-ever paid internship program for youth leaders who have earned their Blue Aprons. It is informed by the developmental relationship framework of the Search Institute, a youth-serving organization that conducts and applies research to promote positive youth development. As part of the program, Palmer is leading a session on life design that asks students to consider what they value and to reflect on how they want to feel.  Leathers sees the internship program as a pilot where staff and youth leaders are co-creating what they hope will be a more formal version of the iterative model that has helped so many young people grow. 

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

Measuring Mission and Meaning

Posted on by Mollie Ames

What if colleges and universities assessed student flourishing on par with traditional metrics like graduation rates and grade point averages? If they did, would they work to improve the conditions under which students report finding meaning, purpose, and wisdom? Would students and families consider these measures in their choice of college?

A new research initiative from the Human Flourishing Project at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science is providing both the means and the encouragement for these scenarios. The Academic Flourishing Initiative launches this month with an invitation to schools across the country to join a research learning community focused on examining how well their institutions promote conditions that lead to flourishing in college and in life.    

Project leaders argue that, as part of the assessment efforts institutions use to benchmark and improve, colleges and universities should understand how university life is helping students grow in wisdom and judgement and whether they are prepared for leadership, citizenship, and problem-solving in an increasingly complex world.

“Our conventional college assessments are all critical and should not be neglected, but we should also broaden our focus,” said Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Project and the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We should consider flourishing both academically and in life more generally. What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, and what we aim for.”  

“What we measure shapes what we discuss, what we know, and what we aim for.”

VanderWeele and his team at Harvard define “academic flourishing” as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of an academic community’s life are good,” including the degree to which institutions help students grow as human beings. It is a focus within the Human Flourishing Program’s longstanding assessment work involving six dimensions of flourishing: happiness, health, meaning, relationships, character, and financial security. It also includes a community flourishing component, which considers, “What does it mean for an academic community to flourish as a community?” This takes into account conditions such as good relationships in the community, proficient leadership, healthy structures and practices, and a shared mission. 

The aim of the Academic Flourishing Initiative is to form a network of schools that participate in assessment and data collection campus-wide, reflect on the data, and learn what institutions can do to more intentionally infuse flourishing into their practices. The heart of the Academic Flourishing Initiative is focused on the individual flourishing of students along with students’ assessment of whether or not their college is contributing to their own formation and flourishing.

Among the assessments available to the institutions is a 24-question student formation survey divided into four themes: knowledge and critical thinking, character formation, citizenship and leadership, and meaning and growth.  VanderWeele said the real innovation within this work is the students’ perception of the contribution of student life not only to their development, growth, knowledge, and critical thinking, but also to their moral foundation, character development, and their capacities for leadership and citizenship.

In acknowledging that assessing institutions’ capacities in these areas holds them accountable for outcomes that many might view as outside their purview, VanderWeele pointed to the mission statements of countless colleges that profess otherwise. A commitment to human-centered education is not only foundational in many institutions but, one might argue, necessary to accomplish more traditional academic outcomes. 

“Even institutions that don’t embrace character formation as part of their mission would arguably find it a necessary part of achieving their cognitive and epistemic goals,” said VanderWeele. “You need a certain level of perseverance to work through difficulties and to push one’s mind. You need a certain level of courage to work through controversial or challenging questions. And you need honesty in test-taking and research practices.” 

As an indication of the widening appeal of this work, four of the questions within the survey were embedded in the Wall Street Journal’s annual college rankings. These four were growth in wisdom, justice, contributing to society, and positively changing the world. While the information won’t be released until the fall, early results show meaningful differences among schools on individual questions within the survey.

VanderWeele was pleased the Wall Street Journal included student formation among the many, more heavily weighted factors in its analysis but said the Academic Flourishing Initiative is more interested in shared learning than competitive benchmarking. Still, the inclusion of formation and flourishing within a widely publicized measure on the comparative value of college says something about what student and families may be yearning for.

To learn more about the Academic Flourishing Initiative, see the Initiative brochure, join a webinar on August 20, or contact Associate Director for Research Brendan Case at brendan_case@fas.harvard.edu or Associate Director for Impact Reece Brown at reece_brown@fas.harvard.edu. 

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