The University of Dayton and Sinclair Community College are just two miles away from one another, but in many ways, they are worlds apart. UD is a private Catholic university providing a four-year undergraduate experience. Sinclair, a public community college, offers the most affordable associate’s degree in the state. And yet, when a group of educators from both institutions held a retreat to explore a partnership around character education, an infectious energy emerged. 

“It was like we fell in love with each other over three days,” said Nancy McHugh, the executive director of the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community at UD. “We went in as two separate groups and came out as one.” 

At the end of the retreat, they named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck. This eclectic group of educators are now the driving force behind an unusual partnership in higher education based on what unites them, not what sets them apart. Funded by the Educating Character Initiative (ECI) out of Wake Forest University’s Center for Leadership and Character, UD and Sinclair will now embed character instruction into curricular and co-curricular initiatives at both schools, with a particular focus on community-engaged learning. At the heart of the initiative is the UD-Sinclair Academy (UDSA), one of the country’s most promising examples of a two-year/four-year transfer collaboration.

They named themselves “the dream team,” and it stuck.

Using character as the bridge, the team believes the work will produce a number of positive outcomes, including expanding the work of personal formation to all students, infusing belonging into the transfer pathway between the schools, and deepening each institution’s commitment to the community. In this sense, the UD/Sinclair character education initiative promises to be a national model for how institutions of different profiles and student populations can create beneficial relationships while deepening their respective missions. 

Breaking New Ground

The initial retreat that brought the team together was part of an ECI capacity building grant meant to help institutions do the groundwork for their character education aspirations. Oftentimes, these planning stages bring into focus existing assets, and in some cases barriers, that can be addressed through a larger effort. Always, it is the people behind the initiatives who ultimately shape how the work takes root.

The UD/Sinclair partnership is led by two academics whose colleagues say they represent the best of each institution: UD’s Nancy McHugh and Sinclair’s Myra Bozeman. McHugh is a philosopher by training, though she calls herself a “weird one,” spending as much time outside the classroom working with students in the community as she does inside it. The Fitz Center, where she is director, is one of several centers at UD that focuses on community-engaged learning — a form of experiential education in which students apply what they are learning in class to the needs of the community. 

Students at the University of Dayton. Courtesy of Nancy McHugh

“I’ve always tried to help students understand that the work we do internal to higher ed travels out into the world,” she said. “The skills we are learning in the humanities, in the liberal arts, have this strong external-facing component that helps us understand how to live better in the world and also develop our personal and professional lives in ways that are really important.” 

Myra Bozeman, the dean of liberal arts, communication and social sciences at Sinclair, was born and raised in Dayton. “I have a deep connection to Sinclair,” she said. “I was the first child in their day care because my mother was a student here. I have a real love for the students, and moreover, the community.” 

Bozeman said that while most faculty at four-year colleges have an expectation about research, the expectation at Sinclair is to be out doing work in the community. This mirrored UD’s Catholic Marianist mission, advanced by its current president, Eric Spina, who in 2017 declared UD the “university of the common good.”

A year earlier, Spina worked closely with Sinclair’s president Steven Johnson to create the UDSA, an affordable pathway for transfer students from Sinclair to UD. USDA students are representative of Sinclair’s population: Most are Pell-eligible, first generation, and/or students of color. For their first two years, USDA students pay Sinclair tuition (around $5,500 annually) rather than UD tuition (around $50,000), while gaining full access to UD’s campus experience and student organizations, as well as co-curricular opportunities at both institutions. When Sinclair students transfer to UD after receiving their associate’s degree, they get a deep discount on tuition. 

Realizing the program’s full potential involves educators from both schools continuing to learn about each other and reflecting on the perceptions they bring to the work. Fortunately, the trust and candor the dream team members built has enabled them to address issues head on. 

“UD is a fantastic institution, but they haven’t, in the past, been the most welcoming platform for students of color,” Bozeman said. “Many Blacks just didn’t feel like they belonged on that campus. I personally believed UD has wanted to welcome our students, but perhaps they didn’t understand how to do it. And now we can help figure that out.” 

UD’s 2024 Culturally Engaging Campus Environments survey revealed that UDSA students experience lower community connection and sense of belonging compared to traditional four-year UD students. However, UDSA students do experience strong educator support at UD and find they have abundant opportunities for positive regional contribution. The dream team sees this as an opportunity for growth and collaboration across institutions, with character-education tied to community-engaged learning as a vehicle to increase the sense of belonging for students in both their curricular and co-curricular lives. 

For McHugh, the belonging gap for the UDSA students sparked an “aha moment” that would lead to a larger inter-institutional effort funded by an ECI institutional impact grant of a little under a million dollars. She told the team, “Let’s use community-engaged learning as a vehicle for character education and then use that to create a common language for character for both institutions to drive forward this sense of belonging for all students.” 

Understanding and communicating what that looks like is an ongoing conversation, both within regular meetings of the dream team and at brainstorming sessions called “charettes.” The project materials describe character as a set of dispositions, or virtuous habits, that shape how we think, feel, and act. The overlay of community-engaged learning means that these habits are shaped by community participation and geared toward the benefit of the community. 

"For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller."

While the benefits of experiential learning are well established, leaders advocate that when implemented with intentional attention to character education, these benefits compound, as student gain not just knowledge and skills but the moral and epistemic dispositions to use them wisely in service to others. In creating a common language and commitment to these principles, the project is guided by nine virtues: joyfulness, curiosity, resilience, hope, integrity, mindfulness, empathy, justice, and community belonging. 

While the foundation of the initiative is rather philosophical, the proposed plan is a tangible list of specific initiatives with deliverables, including work within the community-facing centers and in co-curricular activities for students on both campuses. Much of the energy and resources are pointed inside the classroom. Among the project’s goals are to strengthen cross-institutional collaboration and to empower educators at both institutions to implement character education into their courses. This is happening on many levels, starting with faculty who now teach or guest lecture on both campuses, with many planning to infuse character into their coursework. 

A newly launched faculty fellows program will train 10 new faculty a year from both institutions to use a character pedagogical framework, resulting in a cohort of 70 or so over time. These will include senior character fellows who will act as mentors to other faculty members. 

To improve the UDSA experience for students, “all of Sinclair and all of UD would need to be involved,” McHugh said. “We need to know that when a UDSA student goes into a class in engineering, they will feel a sense of belonging because those educators will have the same sort of language.” Many Sinclair professors, who were unaware of even having UDSA students in their classrooms, are learning how to use a character framework to get to know them.

Dair Arnold, a professor of English at Sinclair, is now running a character pilot in her first-year composition course. While keeping with her standard syllabus, she now adds a character lens to each of her units. In the introduction to writing section, the theme is “know yourself.” Instead of one week of introductory work before the first assignment, Arnold took two weeks where she talked about what character means for students. 

The character “cheat sheet” she gives her students defines it as “who you are becoming and how we choose to act — especially when situations are difficult, uncertain or require us to think beyond ourselves.” 

Arnold said the students are embracing the revised format and feel excited to be a part of something intentional and different. “For me, character is about enlarging my students, not making them smaller, and giving them the skills so they can make informed choices that are good for them, as well as large groups of people.” 

Helping Sinclair students explore their personal growth through character education is a big part of the effort to increase belonging. “I think this project is going to enable the two-year students, and their faculty, to have opportunities they wouldn’t have had otherwise,” said Katherine Rowell, a retired full faculty member at Sinclair who has moved her office down the street to UD and is now heading up faculty development and assessment on the character education initiative. 

Rowell believes the character education will help counterbalance the national narrative about the purpose of community college which has been skewed almost exclusively towards workforce development. “We need both. You can’t do workforce development without also talking about integrity and ethics and resilience,” she said. “Community college students need the opportunity to work on these things, not just students at elite liberal arts colleges.” 

The commitment UD has made to partner with Sinclair on formative education has Rowell hopeful and excited about the work ahead. “I think just the conversations — the faculty from both institutions talking about these things and making sure students are cared for — it is good to be a part of. In all my time working in community college settings, I have never had a four-year institution reach out or make any overture until now.” 

Another dream team member, Danielle Boone, reiterates the importance of character education to the regional workforce missions of both schools, particularly Sinclair. Boone is a UD staff member who runs a program called Professional and Applied Learning (PAL) that supports UDSA students. She is also an adjunct faculty member at UD and Sinclair in psychology and is building character education into these courses.

Much of her work is aimed at preparing students for jobs in the community — one of the goals within the community-engaged learning framework of the initiative. Of the UDSA graduates from 2023 to 2024, 80 percent of those who are employed, have jobs in the Dayton region. Boone sees a through line from the UD/Sinclair character initiative and the needs of the regional workforce. She calls the work “employer-informed character.” 

“This is about making sure our students show up at work as whole people and have the skills they need to persist through adversity and be successful,” she said. “That to me is character. And if we are going to argue about the relevancy of higher education than this is what we’ve got to do.” 

Given UD and Sinclair’s shared commitment to personal growth and community, the dream team’s character initiative may well come full circle, reinforcing what the two institutions had always had in common, yet might not have known. Bozeman recalled an epiphany she had early on in the first dream team retreat: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is going to change our community. This is going to change it all.’” 

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