Formative education is the core of our mission at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development (LSEHD). In fact in 2024 in an unprecedented​ ​venture in American higher education, BC launched the Department of Formative Education (DFE).

Formative education promotes character development—connecting intellectual, social, ethical, and spiritual dimensions in order to lead students toward purposeful lives—stretching back beyond the founding of Boston College to the origins of the Jesuit order. We do not impose a singular set of values on young people. Instead, we propose to students intellectual, social, ethical, and spiritual challenges that help them develop the knowledge, character strengths, and skills required to discern how to live purposeful lives.

We call our approach to this project, “formative leadership education,” to signal a double aspect: we develop the structures and spaces to support formative professional learning to nurture the capacities of leaders to effect formative character education in schools, districts, and networks.

When Boston College was invited to lead the coordination of the KPCEL in 2021, we sought inspiration for our work from Jonathan Lear’s concept of “radical hope.” In his book by the same name, Lear tells the story of how the mythical character of a chickadee served as the spiritual guide for the Crow People in times of cultural devastation.

The chickadee was the wisest of the animals because it could learn from all of them. To find the strength to carry on in the face of immense loss, the Crow People drew on this symbol to learn new ways of being courageous and wise, when the old ways became inaccessible. “The radical hope that was embedded in the ideal of the chickadee helped Plenty Coups throughout his life to make creative decisions in radically new historical circumstances” (Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope). Radical hope is a kind of ethical imagination firmly rooted in reality that can carry us into an unknown future. In this spirit, the Formative Leadership Education team aims to catalyze with the KPCEL our ethical imagination toward a just and joyful future, even as we face real challenges and uncertainties.

Join us in this network to collaborate on character education for human flourishing.