A $50,000 grant from the Lilly Foundation is helping Bellarmine infuse character education through the lens of Thomas Merton’s life and work into a revised core curriculum that launched this fall.

 

“That's not to say that Merton isn't already present in our curriculum, but we are looking at how we might do this in a more robust way university wide,” said Dr. Jon Blandford, assistant provost. The artistic estate of the influential Trappist monk is housed in Bellarmine’s Merton Center, and Merton is at the center of the university’s Catholic identity.

 

A diverse group of faculty from across the university has been working for about a year on ways to infuse Merton and the university’s values into the core curriculum in a more intentional way.

 

With the new core curriculum launch approaching, Blandford said, “it seemed like unusually good timing to put these two ongoing projects together and apply for this capacity-building grant through the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University’s Program for Leadership and Character, which is funded by the Lilly Foundation.”

 

The grant will provide Bellarmine faculty and staff the resources over the next year to develop Merton-infused coursework and new programming. Among other things, the Merton and Mission Working Group plans to host eight teaching workshops in 2024-25; create three new undergraduate courses and/or upper-level seminars; and revise six existing courses and/or seminars.

 

Character at Bellarmine is based upon educating the whole person to realize their highest potential as part of an interconnected world, Blandford said. “We're fortunate to have Merton as a North Star here.” Merton was in many ways ahead of his time, writing about race, about differences, and about the interconnectedness of all our lives.

 

The new core curriculum was designed by faculty across all schools and departments, with input from staff in the Center for Community Engagement and the Student Success Center.

 

“We have refreshed our core curriculum to make it more relevant to 21st century students, building on our liberal arts foundation and incorporating skills-based and competency-based education,” Blandford said. 

 

 

The core also updates the first-year and senior experiences. First-year students will take a new seminar sequence, Knight1/Knight 2, that begins with reflection on the self and then expands to community engagement. The new senior capstone course, the Merici Seminar (named for Saint Angela Merici), will pull together all that students have learned in the core curriculum, Blandford said, and “give them an opportunity to reflect on what did they learn? What does it mean? Why does it matter?”

 

Character education matters, he said. "It's critically important as far as what kind of graduates we are putting out there—people who have integrity and who look at the world with empathy. Someone others can trust and who have the capacity to lead.”