Category: Teaching & Learning

University of Washington professor Elizabeth Kirk regularly arrives early to her introduction to nutrition class and stands outside the lecture hall to welcome her students inside — all 500 of them. She also grants every student email a personal response, reflecting a philosophy that the essential transaction of higher education is the connection between instructors and students.

But lately, Kirk has watched her students become increasingly withdrawn and has been eager to try out new ways to engage them. A recently launched, interdisciplinary initiative at U.W., called Five for Flourishing, wants to help. 

In 2024, a team of U.W. administrators spanning student and academic affairs developed Five for Flourishing to guide faculty members like Kirk in the implementation of strategies to promote connection in the biggest classes across the university’s three campuses. 

The strategies are: adding language to class syllabi that expresses support for student wellbeing; setting up a slide before each class offering wellness resources or prompting students to engage with one another; reminding students before major assignments that they are opportunities to grow rather than reflections of intelligence; organizing small student groups that meet weekly; and instituting mid-quarter evaluations for students to offer feedback on the course.

Taken together, the strategies mean to improve wellbeing by cutting through the feelings of anonymity that can run rampant in huge classes. The interventions set the precedent that professors want to connect with students and care about their personal and academic success. The intended outcomes — sense of belonging, classroom engagement, and intellectual risk-taking, among others — are those often associated with smaller courses and more intimate faculty-student dynamics.

Part wellness intervention, part student success initiative, Five for Flourishing grew out of the needs of several departments. Its dual focus is captured in its interdisciplinary leadership, which includes the provost’s office, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the U.W. Resilience Lab, a hub for campus wellbeing efforts.

The interventions set the precedent that professors want to connect with students and care about their personal and academic success.

According to Penelope Moon, the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, what makes Five for Flourishing unique is the way all five interventions come together, and the unlikely team that assembled them. “The package is an innovation,” she said. “The partnership is an innovation.”

Marisa Nickle, the senior director of strategy and academic initiatives, laid the groundwork for Five for Flourishing. While U.W. staff may be “naturally collaborative,” she said, they tend to be “structurally siloed.” That was a barrier she was prepared to overcome.

With her boss, vice provost for academic and student affairs Philip Reid, Nickle had attended the presentation of another wellbeing initiative that she liked but feared was overly complicated. Curious about how a simpler version could work at U.W., they sought advice from Moon as well as Megan Kennedy, the director of the Resilience Lab, which promotes campus wellbeing through research, education, and strategic programs.  

Kennedy was ready to lend her expertise and welcomed the cross-departmental nature of the initiative. “I think the question universities are trying to answer around mental health is: How do we distribute the responsibility beyond student life and the counseling center and crisis services?” she said.

What many institutions need, Kennedy added, is “a really clear pathway for how everyone can take responsibility.”

But wellbeing interventions in academic spaces are not always easy to implement for time-pressed faculty. Nickle said a major question steering the work was: “How can we bring student success into the classroom and do that in that lightweight way that also thanks faculty for their time and effort?” 

With Kennedy and Moon both on board, and critical support and funding from Vice Provost Reid, the group began to develop an official program, first by deciding on the strategies themselves.  

“It came together fairly quickly,” Moon said. “It was pretty easy to identify the things that probably would help, and then we dug into the literature to confirm suspicions.”

“How can we bring student success into the classroom and do that in that lightweight way that also thanks faculty for their time and effort?” 

Once the five strategies were established, the team turned to enlisting faculty members for a two-year pilot phase of the project, during which educators would institute the interventions in two classes. The recruitment didn’t present much trouble, given plenty of professors, like Kirk, were already interested in incorporating these kinds of learner-centered techniques. 

Not surprisingly, Kirk had been using some of the Five for Flourishing strategies before the program existed. Mid-term evaluations, for example, were standard practice for her and continue to be. She’s long valued how they allow students to feel heard and her to respond to their needs in real time.

Other interventions, though, were new to Kirk, like the “growth-mindset” reminders. It’s another way she’s appreciated being able to establish a rapport with her students. 

“This is just my way of assessing how well I’m getting across to you — how well you are understanding what it is I’m saying,” she now tells her class before tests. “Because if I need to revisit some things, I want to do that.”

While Kirk doesn’t expect one practice to expel her students’ performance anxiety completely, she thinks they appreciate the sentiment. One even wrote in the course feedback that the language “made me feel calmer.”

Samantha Robinson, a professor in the chemistry department, teaches lectures with between 100 and 300 students. The uphill battle is made steeper by chemistry’s reputation as one of the most difficult and demanding subjects. 

“They hear horror stories. They’re under this impression that we’re ‘weed-out’ classes,” Robinson said. “And that isn’t ever our goal.”

In 2025, Robinson started implementing Five for Flourishing in two courses that tend to draw those without strong chemistry backgrounds — those who might feel particularly uncomfortable or nervous about the class.

“Those are really great student populations for this sort of an initiative because they are feeling pretty intimidated to be in a STEM class in a lot of cases,” Robinson said. Five for Flourishing, she hoped, could increase their sense of belonging and support. 

Over time, Robinson determined which elements of the program she found helpful. She likes the syllabus and growth-mindset language and the “moment-to-arrive” slides. The midterm evaluations present more of a challenge because, given the highly structured nature of her courses, she can’t plan to change much about them half-way through the term.

Both Robinson and Kirk came out with mixed reviews of the effort to have students meet weekly in small groups. They know it’s difficult to get students to get together on their own outside of class.

Robinson found that the students in a 120-person course were more likely to meet than those in her 285-person class. Kirk tweaked the structure so that the groups gathered during “quiz sections,” a pre-existing T.A.-led class time. 

More formal assessment of the initiative has also been ongoing since the beginning thanks to the contributions of Lovenoor Aulck, a data scientist working in the provost’s office. 

Aulck developed pre- and post-course surveys to assess the impact of the five interventions on students’ reported sense of belonging, confidence, and academic support, among other measures. Aulck said he’s found “small positive gains,” based on data from the first year of implementation. 

Some of the promising findings include that, by course end, students were more likely to indicate feeling accepted and comfortable being themselves in class and less likely to indicate feeling worried about being judged negatively based on their identity.

But data collection is in its pilot phase as much as the rest of the program; and the Five for Flourishing staff plans to continue tweaking each facet of the work as needed.

That doesn’t mean the program can’t grow at the same time. Already, the group has collaborated with the University of Georgia to help engineer its own version of Five for Flourishing called Wellbeing by Design.  

As the U.W. team monitors their own progress, and swaps stories with partners near and far, perhaps students nationwide will begin to find their big classrooms feel a little smaller.

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

Around 500 professionals across higher education logged on Thursday for a webinar focused on how to institutionalize a culture of wellbeing on college campuses. 

The virtual event, called “Beyond Silos: Bridging Academic and Student Affairs to Advance Student Wellbeing,” was a joint initiative of the LearningWell Coalition and U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network, two national organizations dedicated to promoting health and wellbeing at colleges and universities.

The webinar was inspired by the understanding that the efforts of a few positive actors on campus, no matter how committed, can’t move the wellbeing needle alone; they need the support of each other and collective action of the wider institution to make meaningful change.

“What if our systems were designed so that without any external intervention, they produced wellbeing and flourishing just by the way that they function?” asked Kelly Gorman, one of the four panelists and the director of the office of health promotion at the University of Albany.

The other three experts included Jennifer Fee, the assistant director of curriculum and training development for the Skorton Center for Health Initiatives at Cornell University; Angela Lindner, the interim vice provost for undergraduate affairs at the University of Florida; and Joe Tranquillo, the associate provost for transformative teaching and learning at Bucknell University.

Marjorie Malpiede, the editor-in-chief of LearningWell magazine, moderated the session, which began with a discussion of why a whole-campus approach to wellbeing is the right one.

Several of the panelists described how implementing wellbeing efforts institution-wide creates a system of support for students that extends beyond bare-bones crisis management or clinical mental health care. The goal is not just to keep issues from worsening, they said, but to foster new heights of flourishing. 

“What if our systems were designed so that without any external intervention, they produced wellbeing and flourishing just by the way that they function?”

Jennifer Fee noted how these kinds of wrap-around supports are key to student academic performance. As for faculty and staff, she said, developing the whole-campus approach pushes them to practice creative problem solving and work across differences and between departments — that is, “beyond silos.”

On a higher level, Joe Tranquillo called out how the whole-campus approach, and ideally improving student wellbeing outcomes on a mass scale, might be influential in improving public trust in higher education as a whole. 

“I think that we need to show what transformations are occurring in our students — how they’re becoming these amazing citizen leaders that are going to go out into the world and do great things,” he said.

But the panelists weren’t shy about identifying the challenges that come with trying to unite different departments and disciplines under a common goal, even one as non-threatening as wellbeing. Institutions of higher education, they noted, are famously quick to factionalize and historically slow to change.

Angela Lindner called one foundational barrier to institutionalizing wellbeing a “challenge of the heart.” “This is less about how to do the work,” she said, “and it’s more about convincing folks that it’s important to do.”

Lindner described a steady struggle to inspire broad interest in an issue that faculty and staff may perceive to be outside their usual focus and adding to their already full plates. From there, sustaining any energy that does emerge is another battle.

Buy-in from top leadership is particularly key, given presidents’ ability to fund and promote a wellbeing agenda. But again, the panelists said, such a champion is not so easily won or kept.

Still, the spirit of the panel remained hopeful. All four experts are as familiar with the obstacles to institutionalizing wellbeing as they are the workarounds.

“One mistake is only paying attention to the coalition of the willing,” Tranquillo said he’s learned. “That feels good. It works great at first because you make really quick progress… But what it does is it means that there’s then a bunch of people who are not included in the change.”

Tranquillo urged the audience to be persistent in efforts to draw fresh support, but also to be patient with the process. “Sometimes the best you’re going to do is to get them to stop fighting you,” he said. 

Gorman added that bringing in new and diverse leadership for projects can help expand involvement as well as impact. “You can’t have just one person or one office leading everything,” she said. “You need leaders from all different areas to bring their perspective to the table.”

Most of Fee’s attention is directed toward helping faculty understand the importance of incorporating wellbeing in the classroom and then actually doing so.

“I have to make sure that they’re seeing the strategies that I’m sharing with them as not one more thing, but helping them do their jobs better, contributing to the academic success of students,” she said.

The online toolkit Fee developed, called WISE (Well-being in Scholarly Environments), includes evidence-based resources for instructors to, for example, write a wellbeing-forward syllabus or develop coursework that builds connections between students.

The need to develop ways of tracking and measuring student wellbeing was also a recurring theme. Clarifying the desired outcomes can reveal gaps in the work and roles that need to be built, Tranquillo said. 

“There should be dashboards,” Lindner added. “It should be open and available, and everybody can see how we’re doing in this agreed upon set of wellbeing metrics across the board.”

Meanwhile, buy-in may build with time and necessity. Faculty will come up against wellbeing’s impact on academic performance; residential life will see repercussions for social involvement; admissions will connect the dots to stop-outs and retention.

“At some point, when you get to a level of root cause analysis,” Gorman said, “you’re going to be on the same playing field. You’re going to be at that same table.”

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

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Since its founding in 1863, Boston College, like many Jesuit institutions, has practiced “whole person” teaching, powered by the belief that one learns in multi-dimensional ways well beyond subject matter knowledge and vocational training. Over the last 20 years, B.C. has devoted particular time and resources to developing its approach and becoming a leader in the larger field, known as “formative education.”  

The university in Chestnut Hill, Mass. now has a formative education department within the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and has recently launched a campus-wide Transformative Education Lab (TLab), an interdisciplinary research and innovation hub dedicated to advancing the theory and practice of formative education.  

“We’ve been building up a particular vision of what education for undergraduate students should be about,” said Stanton Wortham, dean of the Lynch School. “Formative education is this notion of integrated or holistic approaches that are not just intellectual and not just vocational but include an interconnected set of social, emotional, ethical, and spiritual questions and developments.”

Wortham said the lab is designed to clarify and promote formative education so that it may benefit other institutions, both K-12 and higher education. Its first mission is to share best practices, through the literature and by convening people who are doing this work. Secondly, the lab will focus on the research on the method itself, with an intention to distinguish it from other practices such as social and emotional learning or character education.  

“All of those things are good but what we are doing here is different and has something special to offer,” Wortham said. “The purpose of the lab is to articulate that and present it to people more broadly.” 

“What we often do with children is just teach academic material, mostly through memorization, when what we need to do is ask them what kind of person they want to be.”

According to Wortham, formative education has four distinctions: It focuses on intrinsic ends, developing dispositions that stay with us for life; it centers both individual and community development so that young people are disposed to contribute to the common good; it is holistic, acknowledging the multiple dimensions within which young people develop — emotionally, relationally, civically, ethically, and spiritually; and it includes an emphasis on purpose, on discerning what we are called to do.

Deoksoon Kim is a Lynch School professor in the Teaching, Curriculum, and Society department and a strong believer in how the right kind of education can change people’s lives. As the inaugural director of the TLab, she seeks to seed within other institutions a method she believes can lead to personal growth in a way that other pedagogies cannot quite match.    

“What we often do with children is just teach academic material, mostly through memorization, when what we need to do is ask them what kind of person they want to be,” Kim said. “As an educator, I really wanted to make differences in people’s lives and in the world. This work really gave me a deeper sense of who I am and what I want to be doing.”

Kim has an ambitious blueprint for the TLab that includes three major strategies announced at the launch. In an effort to jump start and share new ideas, the TLab will hold a K-12 Formative Education Grant Competition which identifies and supports promising practices in schools, after-school programs, and community-based learning environments.  

In summer 2026, the TLab will host an intensive professional development institute designed to prepare K-12 educators and leaders to implement formative education practices in their teaching and leadership. And in October 2026, the TLab will hold its inaugural conference on formative education, bringing together scholars and practitioners from around the country and the world in both K-12 and higher education.  

Kim said developing the TLab to help expand the formative education pedagogy within higher education is a major goal. It is part of what she hopes will address a narrow focus on academic standards that she and others believe has “gone too far.”

“This is a great kind of a movement we are in — one that broadens education to be about meaning, character and purpose,” Kim said. “This is what we need to do to transform higher education.”  

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

In 1965, students at the newly established University of California, Irvine, chose, as their mascot, the anteater. The unusual selection was an attempt to distinguish the university from others within the state system, leading to a campus identity that remains unique.  

Today, U.C. Irvine has embraced a university-wide approach to teaching and learning that once again reflects its independence. Anteaters Virtues is a pedagogical and research initiative that promotes a set of intellectual character traits meant to underpin a student’s educational journey. If this sounds like something critics of higher education might call indoctrination, Anteater Virtues is, in fact, the opposite. 

“We don’t just train people to be doctors or engineers or business leaders; we train people to think for themselves, and that is profoundly liberating,” said Duncan Pritchard, a distinguished professor of philosophy at U.C. Irvine and the creator of Anteater Virtues.   

The virtues — curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual tenacity —  are first introduced to students at orientation. Students work on them, in different forms, as they advance to their degrees. The hope is that these intellectual building blocks will help students develop a greater capacity to learn and to succeed in a rapidly changing world.   

Launched as a pilot in 2017, Anteaters Virtues is hitting its stride. The initiative has recently received a $400,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment as part of the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, supporting schools dedicated to making character education central to their academic mission.  

The grant will fund, in part, a major push to bring Anteater Virtues to other institutions attracted to the method’s commitment to freedom of ideas and the development of durable skills. Indeed, the initiative’s leaders believe that a return to intellectual virtues may be what’s needed to address many of the problems facing higher education today. 

Anteater Origins 

Duncan Pritchard is an epistemologist from the U.K. who had a keen interest in the intellectual side of character education when he arrived at U.C. Irvine in 2017 from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. As a knowledge scholar, Pritchard sought to understand how intellectual virtues could be embedded into an educational setting.  

“A lot of people are focused on moral or civic virtue in terms of character education, but my interest is in intellectual character: How can we get students to understand that what they are doing is actually cultivating intellectual virtues that will stay with them for life?” he said.

Pritchard explored the idea of identifying and explaining a digestible set of  intellectual virtues that would be taught throughout a student’s trajectory. The vision included faculty training to infuse these virtues into the classroom. 

Pritchard admits that attempting to transform curriculum at an Research-1 university seemed like “absolute madness,” but he was surprised and encouraged when he received the full support of U.C. Irvine Chancellor Howard Gillman and Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Michael Dennin.  

“When Duncan came to me with this idea of creating intellectual virtues that would be a framework for teaching and learning, I thought, ‘Yes, this is what anteaters are all about,’ and so that’s what we called it,” Dennin said. 

While Dennin was excited about the potential of Anteater Virtues, he said he always viewed the initiative as a “long game” effort.  

“We could have made a big announcement telling everyone they have to use these, but that was never going to work,” he said. “Instead, we said, ‘Let’s do this slow and steady, get the modules developed, and engage some early adopters.’” 

With leadership backing him, Pritchard focused on two tracks: implementation and assessment. After introducing the concept as a pilot, he expanded it to the entire university with a grant from the Templeton Foundation. To allow the initiative to scale quickly, he developed online modules. Core modules are included in the orientation course that all incoming U.C. Irvine students take, with other introductory modules embedded into regular courses or taken for extra credit. More advanced modules, including a capstone version, round out a more in-depth experience.

To help assess the work, Pritchard enlisted the expertise and support of Richard Arum, a professor of sociology and education and the former dean of the U.C. Irvine School of Education. The well-known sociologist and author is also the director of the U.C. Irvine MUST Project (Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories). Arum’s unprecedented data collection on undergraduate experiences and outcomes would now include measuring the effect of Anteater Virtues. Like Dennin, Arum became an eager partner.  

“This work really spoke to me as a faculty member and a scholar and as someone who has been thinking about how we educate individuals in the 21st century,” said Arum, who is the author of “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” 

“A lot of character education to me is politically challenging and not very productive, given people’s different perspectives,” he continued. “But shifting some of that work into intellectual virtues — academic values — that can promote scholarly dispositions, I found to be a very useful intervention.”

It became clear that for the virtues initiative to be embraced on campus, even one as free-spirited as U.C. Irvine, it would need to be strategically positioned — from the chancellor’s endorsement to its distinction among character work to its iterative implementation. Perhaps the most important step to ensure the Anteaters Virtues’ acceptance on campus was the careful identification and communication of the virtues themselves.  

Dispositions for Life 

“When I think about the core of a research university, I don’t think we could do much better than to start with curiosity,” Dennin said. “That’s what we’re all about. It is important as a virtue but also as an antidote to something I find disturbing in society today: that questioning things, which should be a positive, has become a negative.”  

“When I think about the core of a research university, I don’t think we could do much better than to start with curiosity. It is important as a virtue but also as an antidote to something I find disturbing in society today: that questioning things, which should be a positive, has become a negative.”

A major theme throughout the four virtues is a return to inquiry as a core value of education. After curiosity comes integrity, which at first glance may appear to be about plagiarism and misconduct in the age of A.I. Pritchard said Anteater Virtues turns this around, asking students: What does good conduct look like? The last two virtues — intellectual humility and intellectual tenacity — complement one another, though Pritchard said they are often misunderstood. 

“The reason we chose intellectual humility and intellectual tenacity is that a lot of students think of them as opposing concepts — that to have conviction is to not listen to another’s point of view and that humility is a lack of conviction,” Pritchard said. “What we are trying to convey is that intellectual humility is respect for others’ viewpoint and is critical to one’s capacity to learn new information, and tenacity means stick to your guns but also be sensitive to the fact you could be wrong.” 

Arum is particularly appreciative of this virtue pairing and believes it holds a strong message across the board.  

“Some of the problems we are having in the sector as a whole, with students and faculty alike, come from not embracing intellectual dispositions,” Arum said. “It’s great to have convictions and want to do good in the world, but the way that that is acted upon sometimes abandons humility and curiosity. So it becomes just advocacy, and that’s very off-putting. If faculty are not showing an openness to other perspectives, how can we expect that from students?”  

Getting faculty to embrace Anteaters Virtues is a large part of the effort. To gradually build the virtues into the curriculum, Anteater Virtues is now part of  pedagogical training for faculty and teaching assistants, hundreds of whom have taken the modules. Pritchard said the reaction thus far has been encouraging.  

“Now we’ve got engineers talking about intellectual grit, an educational theorist talking about humility. We have a Shakespearian scholar talking about integrity. In each case, they are connecting the intellectual virtues to what most interests them,” he said. 

Pritchard said they are well on their way to attaining their target of 80 percent of students being exposed to the virtues programs through general education courses, and all of them have taken introductory modules as part of their orientation. Students, faculty, and staff are also regularly reminded of the virtues by posters on campus and continuous references by Chancellor Gillman, who promotes the project whenever possible — from convocation to commencement.  

For those who remain skeptical, or less enamored by the virtues’ philosophical core, Pritchard said he uses the development of durable, enduring skills as his pitch. In a technology-based marketplace, specialized skills can quickly become redundant. “This is something that you learn at university that will stay with you for life,” he said.

Evidence of the program’s effectiveness is also convincing. Arum’s research on the effort is nascent though promising. Following pre- and post-studies of student and faculty experiences with Anteater Virtues, one report revealed: “The intervention was effective at promoting knowledge of what intellectual virtue is, why it is important, and how to implement it, suggesting the importance of instruction in virtue learning.” 

But despite the early data, Arum summons the integrity virtue in cautioning against broad conclusions. “Large public universities are very noisy places,” he said. “It is very hard to capture the attention of either students or faculty.” 

As the Anteaters Virtues team continues to communicate the project’s benefits, they are expanding the focus to other universities in the United States and abroad with support of their institutional impact grant from the Wake Forest E.C.I. program. Public versions of the model are now freely available and come with a commitment to help other universities learn how to implement and assess the program. 

“We’re sort of a beacon now,” Pritchard said. “We’ve done it here, and we want to use it to promote a conversation about higher education generally — what its purpose is and how we can use this model to help meet the existential challenges that are coming our way.” 

Dennin agrees, believing an intellectual virtues framework can address a number of the issues facing higher education from academic freedom to the value of a college degree to the myriads of opportunities and challenges posed by the proliferation of technology.   

Dennin even wonders if Anteater Virtues can help with a critical question about the use of A.I.: “What do we do that A.I. doesn’t do?” he asked aloud.

“What does faculty bring to class if A.I. can deliver information and answer questions?” he said. “How does a student learn if they are just using A.I. to do the work? This is where curiosity, integrity, humility, and tenacity come into play. You may have all the information, but what conclusions are you drawing?” 

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

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.

At the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., the question isn’t just what students will do after graduation — it’s who they’ll become, quite consciously. In an age when higher education is often measured by employment rates, St. Thomas is leaning into a different measure of success: whether students leave not just with a degree, but with a sense of purpose. 

Through The Purpose Project, launching this fall, the university is reframing college as a formative journey, one in which reflection, storytelling, and ethical exploration are as essential as more traditional career prep. As the new thinking goes, if all a student takes away from college is an entrée to their first job, they — and the college — have missed the point of higher education.

“I think we fail our students if, when they graduate, all they think college was good for was getting them their first job out of college,” said Christopher Michaelson, professor of business ethics. “But,” he conceded, “we also fail them if we don’t help them get that first job.”

The heart of the new initiative sits in the juncture of that tension between the practical and the profound, at a time when the practical is increasingly under the crosshairs for “return on investment.” Part cultural philosophy, part pedagogical blueprint, The Purpose Project asks a different question than the ones colleges often lead with. The focus is not so much “What career do you want?” but instead “What kind of life are you trying to build?” And then it offers the tools for that blueprint.

From the earliest conception, the project was never meant to be a philosophical silo but a shift in the university’s core culture: a way of weaving reflection and purpose through the fabric of a student’s entire experience. Amy McDonough, chief of staff in the Office of the President, watched this idea take root in the university’s leadership and spread throughout the campus.

“We wanted this to be something that students encounter throughout their time here — not just a one-off retreat or capstone,” she said. “It’s not about putting pressure on students to ‘find their purpose’ in college. That’s too much. Instead, it’s about equipping them to begin the lifelong process of searching.”

The Purpose Project took shape with support from a Lilly Endowment grant and was further strengthened by campus-wide strategic planning, culminating in its inclusion as a priority. University President Rob Vischer allocated institutional support to the initiative, advocating that a St. Thomas education must be more than transactional.

In the process of planning, McDonough and her colleagues began an audit of what was already happening across the university. They discovered that many faculty had been doing work rooted in vocation and reflection. The task then became one of elevation: recognizing that existing work, giving it a common language, and creating a framework that could unify and strengthen it.

Around the same time, a grant through the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University was also awarded to the Office of the Provost to support faculty development around the teaching of virtue and character formation. The initiative focuses on helping faculty explore how virtues such as integrity, empathy, and courage can be integrated into their teaching across disciplines. And it complements other elements of The Purpose Project by reinforcing the university’s mission to cultivate ethical leaders and graduates committed to the common good. 

The touchpoints of The Purpose Project now include a reimagined First-Year Experience course that introduces students to vocational thinking from day one. Sophomore-year retreats, piloted with students from the Dougherty Family College at St. Thomas, are designed to meet students at a mid-college moment when questions of major, direction, and identity converge. For seniors, faculty are working to infuse capstones with deeper reflection on purpose.

Even techniques like storytelling, which might seem tangential to vocation, have been folded into The Purpose Project’s scope. Faculty have partnered with organizations like Narrative 4, co-founded by author Colum McCann and supported by figures like Bono and Sting, to help students tell their own stories. In telling where they’ve come from, students reflect on who they are, who they want to become, and how they want to contribute to the bigger picture. 

“Students come to realize, ‘I can tell my story, and I reflect a little bit about myself.’ And then if you can carry that through, you combine that with what you’re learning and how you want to show up in the world,” McDonough said. 

Still, she was quick to note that the project, with its exercises and skillsets, is meant to feel organic, not imposed. “It’s about recognizing and elevating the work that’s already happening. When you talk to alums, it’s been a distinctive piece of their education,” she said. “This isn’t about adding more to people’s plates. We’re not talking about taking on another minor. This is work that helps you reflect on the rest of your life.” 

A new elective class, designed by Michaelson, the business ethics professor, is one of the most tangible expressions of The Purpose Project. Called “Work and the Good Life,” the course is launching this fall in two pilot sections. The idea had been percolating for years, grounded in Michaelson’s research and personal convictions, as well as research for his book “Is Your Work Worth It?” which explores the intersection of personal fulfillment, ethical responsibility, and professional ambition. The Purpose Project brought together a team of faculty to build the course from the ground up.

Michaelson had long been observing a tension in his students. Many were driven, focused, pragmatic — laser-aimed at securing that first job. But what many lacked, he felt, was space to ask the bigger questions: What is work for? How does it fit into a good life? What responsibilities come with privilege and education?

The course invites students into those questions. Developed with input from faculty across disciplines — chemistry, social work, English, entrepreneurship, and political science — the course is interdisciplinary and intentionally open to students from all majors. One section is dedicated to honors students; the other is open enrollment. But both sections will converge at times for plenary speakers and shared conversation.

Each week, students experience three modes of engagement: a lecture-style session, a small-group discussion, and an asynchronous reflection. Assignments are deliberately experiential and reflective. In one assignment, students interview someone whose job does not require a college degree, seeking to understand motivations and obstacles. In another, they interview a retiree to explore how perspectives on work evolve over time. Throughout, they pursue methods of creating a life path using tools from the world of design thinking, while also building an appreciation of the idea that paths rarely unfold as planned.

The culminating assignment is a letter to a “wise elder”— a parent, mentor, or imagined confidant. In it, students reflect on three fictional job offers, each with its own balance of compensation, passion, and public service. Their task is to justify, in writing, the path they feel drawn to and why. It’s a final exercise in what Michaelson called “asking better questions.”

“I’m not telling students what kind of work they should do,” he said. “I’m helping them ask better questions. That’s the real goal.”

“I’m not telling students what kind of work they should do. I’m helping them ask better questions. That’s the real goal.”

In many ways, the crux of the forward-thinking course lies in a deceptively old-school tool: a physical workbook. Unlike most contemporary digital course materials, this one is tactile. Students write by hand. They fold it open on dorm desks and coffee shop tables. Forming answers this way takes time.

“Research suggests that we learn differently when we actually write by hand,” Michaelson said. “It slows you down. It encourages reflection.” 

The workbook includes single-day exercises and multi-part projects, but perhaps its most endearing quality is its intentional tone. Michaelson likened it to the Dr. Seuss book “My Book About Me,” a fill-in-the-blank childhood journal filled with drawings and declarative statements. (“My favorite food is macaroni and cheese! When I grow up I want to be an astronaut!”)

Michaelson’s own children had copies, and years later, enjoyed the glimpses of their past selves. That’s the spirit he hopes this workbook captures: not to infantilize students, but to offer a keepsake of where they were at this moment in life.

“I hope years from now,” he said, “they look back and say, ‘That’s what I thought I wanted… and here’s what I’ve learned since.’”

It’s all part of the focus on intentional work — with an eye to giving back. While some programs and institutions stress an element of being the best X you can be, St. Thomas, as a school founded in a faith tradition, believes in going a step further and linking your goals towards larger obligation. 

“We don’t say, ‘You can be anything you want to be.’ If you want to be a really good bank robber, well, that might be O.K. in other places, but we’re more judgy than that,” McDonough laughed. “We say, ‘You can be anything you want to be — for the common good.’ It’s also about what you’re bringing to the world. That’s a distinction here.”