Claudia Vanney, director of the Institute of Philosophy, presented at Oriel College (Oxford) the institutional experience of Austral in the formation of the intellectual character of university professors.
From January 9 to 11, 2025, the conference was held at Oriel College (Oxford). 13th Annual Conference: Character and Global ChallengesOrganized by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, the meeting brought together specialists from around the world to analyze the role of character education in the face of contemporary social, cultural, and technological challenges.
On behalf of the Universidad AustralClaudia Vanney presented the communication Cultivating Intellectual Virtues: A strategy to enhance teaching, research and curricular innovation at Universidad Austral, in which he described the development and lessons learned from the institutional project of intellectual virtues. The initiative began with the creation of twelve groups of teachers (Faculty Learning Communities), from all the faculties of Austral, dedicated to exploring ways to cultivate the intellectual character of students through curriculum redesign and the transformation of teaching practices.
During her presentation, Vanney explained how more than 130 professors have sustained their intrinsic motivation for two years to explicitly incorporate virtues such as open-mindedness, rigor, curiosity, and perseverance into their teaching. This broad and cross-disciplinary participation makes the project a potentially replicable model for other universities interested in promoting character education through teaching.
The presentation detailed the theoretical framework that integrates teacher professional development and virtue epistemology, the approach to motivating and supporting teachers, the methodology used, and the main institutional effects observed to date. It also identified the factors that facilitate the adoption of initiatives of this kind and proposed lines of research for future stages of the project.
The ideas developed at the conference were later expanded upon and published in the Journal of Moral EducationThe full article can be viewed here.
