Welcome to the second issue of the 2022, Volume 18 of the Journal of Character Education. This issue concludes the volume with a strong lineup of compelling articles—including a new Opinion article, following the successful introduction of the Opinion section in Volume 17, Issue 1 last year.
This issue includes five empirical articles. The articles explore several topics, including moral, purpose, and leadership development, forgiveness and character, and teacher efficacy in moral teaching, using samples ranging from elementary school students to undergraduate students to classroom teachers.
Two studies used qualitative interviews of college students. Michelle Zhou, Julia Linger, Jonathan Sepulveda, Terese Lund, Belle Liang, and Angela DeSilva Mousseau interviewed U.S. university students about purpose development using a meaning-making framework, seeking to illuminate the processes of purpose development following adverse experiences. Perry Glanzer and Theodore Cockle explored students’ perceptions of their own moral development at a faith-based institution, finding peers and mentors as being particularly influential.
Angela Wang, Maurice Elias, Edward Selby, and Simon Daniel present findings from a broader study of a social-emotional and character development (SECD) program in a U.S. middle school exploring its relation to leadership development. With U.S. elementary school students, Jonathan Tirrell tested a model of forgiveness and its relation to foundational and moral character attributes, and disaggregated findings across subgroups to explore the robustness of the findings. Enhancing our evaluation toolboxes, Richard Osguthorpe, Sarah Clark, and Richard Sudweeks tested a measure for assessing U.S. teachers’ self-efficacy in the moral work of teaching, highlighting the framework and validating the model.
Last, we continue our new Opinion section with a piece by Arthur Schwartz, president of Character.org, in which he reflects on the complex and less-than-perfect past of character education in the United States. He situates personal stories within the history of character education, asking important questions, which are not always the easiest to answer—but need to be asked.
As a reminder, the JCE Opinion articles are open access and are made available on the JCE website, below. As we noted in the inaugural Opinion section (JCE 17-1, 2021), we would love to hear responses and feedback—to foster a dialogue—on the issues raised in these invited Opinion pieces. As such, we have dedicated a page on the Center for Character and Citizenship’s website where all JCE Opinion articles will be posted and comments welcomed (and moderated). Please visit https://characterandcitizenship.org/about-the-journal to learn more about the Journal, peruse our Opinion articles, and contribute to the conversation.
