Watch this space for announcements about the 2025 KPCEL Convening!

The KPCEL

Kern Partners for Character and Educational Leadership (KPCEL) is a nationwide network of institutions in the process of implementing character education initiatives. At the KPCEL, higher education faculty and administrators, K–12 teachers and leaders, nonprofit innovators, and policymakers convene to collaborate, learn, and generate praxis in the field of formative character education.

Since 2022, BC’s Formative Leadership Education team has been organizing annual convenings for the network. These events are unique opportunities for folks from Higher Education, K–12, and other human development sectors to mingle. At the annual conference for the KPCEL, you can expect opportunities to network and learn from people with diverse leadership, scholarship, and teaching experience and expertise.

Each year the FLE team looks to the network to develop a theme for the convening. Our introduction of themes for the convening has sparked fresh thinking about what it means to educate whole persons for lives of meaning and purpose, or put in a different register, for flourishing. In 2022 we drew on the notion of Radical Hope. In 2023 we wondered what the arts might reveal about character education today. And in 2024 we posed an important question to the community: how should this community, a community that places special value on the fostering and exercise of moral judgment, respond to the recent advances in AI?

Check out the archives of the past convenings below, where you can download the original programs. 

The theme for the annual convening guides the keynotes and might inspire some of the sessions. However, the KPCEL convening is and will remain a place for the network to bring your best work on formative character education.

Over the last three years, we have had the privilege of working with many of you to catalyze the field of character education! Thank you for going on this journey with us. We hope to see you at the next event!