The Making Teaching Matter for Civic and Intellectual Life (MTM) Project

About the Project

The Funding

This work is funded by the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University.

The Research

Existing research on EL Education is very promising. One study conducted by Mathematica Policy Research was a quasi-experimental study of students from five EL Education middle schools (Nichols-Barrer & Haimson, 2013).

  • Findings revealed positive and statistically significant impacts on student achievement after two years of student exposure and three years of student exposure.

  • Additional research (also with Mathematica) is currently underway. Although existing research is very promising, to date there has been no research examining the ways in which EL Education cultivates ethical character in students, despite the importance of ethical character to the EL Education instructional model.

 
 

Our Study

The Making Teaching Matter for Civic and Intellectual Life project aims to spark interest in character development among faculty and students in the School of Education and Human Development. The work, led by Drs. Sara Rimm-Kaufman, Jamie Jirout, Rachel Wahl, and Jim Soland, has focused on the cultivation of civic virtues including civic engagement, discourse across differences, and ethical decision-making as well as intellectual virtues such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility.

In our 2024-2025 capacity building year, the project team outlined three major aims.

Research Aims

  1. Institute a professional learning community (PLC) among faculty focused on character development

  2. Elevate student voice to describe ethical struggles that they face so that faculty can meet student needs

  3. Engage in pilot work evaluating change in students’ awareness of and concern for character to understand the impact of the work

Current Products

We are currently working on analyzing our data. Stay tuned for our findings!