Can virtue be learned? An exploration of student learning experiences in ethics courses and their implications for influencing moral character

Abstract

What does it mean to teach virtue, or to learn it? We consider this question through an institutional review board (IRB) supported research study attending to student learning experiences in undergraduate ethics courses at a Catholic university with an explicit commitment to social justice. This essay draws on and interprets qualitative data concerning the outcomes of select pedagogical approaches that involve exposing students to the experiences of others: the use of narratives; participation in structured experiential learning activities; and community engagement through deep listening and facilitated dialogue. We focus our interpretation around the implications of these pedagogies in relation to student understanding of and attitudes regarding three character traits identified as “other‐regarding” virtues in theological and philosophical scholarship – altruism, compassion, and solidarity. This paper considers the implications of these pedagogies and the practical effects of different sorts of teaching strategies on students' self‐understanding as moral agents.

Teaching Ethics to Undergraduate Psychology Students: Review of the Evidence and Recommendations

“…Several other pedagogical strategies to bridge theory and practices have been suggested. To facilitate students' transfer of what they learned in an ethics course to their personal and professional life, deep listening and facilitated dialogue with local community members, as well as students' reflections in response to experiential learning activities, are effective pedagogical methods (Cochran & Weaver, 2017). Tutor-guided small group teaching in which there is more room for debate and reflection were much more effective than lecture-based teaching (Engel-Glatter et al, 2016).…”

Liberating the classroom: Ethnographic elements in liberation theologies curricula

“…Similarly Musa Dube writes of employing the “reading with” method in teaching a course on Synoptic Gospels in Botswana; she sent students to read healing narratives with the public in order to make the course relevant in a context impacted by HIV and AIDS (Dube, 2002). While these Southern African contributions speak of liberationist approaches to teaching and learning theology in general, colleagues in the Global North have written about the role of lived experience in the context of teaching liberation theologies in particular (Reddie, 2008; Strain, 2000), as well as specific liberation theological themes such as the preferential option for the poor (Cochran & Weaver, 2017, pp. 249–250).…”

“…Second, some argue that site visits are “one of the most powerful tools available to instructors in the fields of both religious studies and interfaith studies” (Long, 2018, p. 83). In this vein, the benefits of site visits or other ways of interacting with communities outside of academia have also been addressed in the context of teaching liberation theologies (Cochran & Weaver, 2017; Strain, 2000), or teaching theology in a manner that is informed by liberation theologies (Dube, 2002; Kaunda, 2014; West, 2016). Charles Strain (2000) explains that he used to make stories from Latin America (using novels, films, social science studies) central in the liberation theology curriculum that he taught in the United States.…”

“…Strain witnessed this shift's enabling “[k]ey themes in our Liberation Theology course retroactively [catching] fire with these students when we saw them enacted along the [Mexican] border” (p. 3). For their part, Elizabeth Cochran and Darlene Weaver (2017) write that their students reported that visits to, and encounters with, members of an impoverished urban neighborhood had helped them to understand the liberation theological course reading material. Yet, as the facilitators, they also observed a level of othering remaining firmly in place in the students' thinking about the neighborhood, underlining the complexities of this type of learning.…”

“…56–57). Other scholars draw attention to the affective dimension of experiential or embodied teaching and learning, which widens understanding through feeling the world (Cochran & Weaver, 2017, p. 250; Reddie, 2008). As Anthony Reddie (2008) observes:

… what I mean to say is that to ‘get it [Black theology]’ one has to begin from the perspective that asks ‘how does this feel’ and ‘what does it mean’ towards the more generic or wider forms of thinking or analysis.

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