Formative Leadership Education
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). The DFE is devoted to the interdisciplinary exploration of questions at once perennial and pressing: How do we educate whole persons for meaningful lives? How do we cultivate community? How do we nurture vision and values? In DFE, faculty conduct groundbreaking research on the cultivation of character, the expansion of imagination, and realization of purpose.
As a pillar of BC’s strategic plan, Boston College has a distinctive culture of formation.
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.