Forming Civic Virtue through an Honors Seminar Focused on Local Civil Rights History

Citizenship and related values are common elements in the missions of honors programs. Our goal was to design a junior honors seminar with an intentional focus on developing citizenship, civic identity, and civic virtues through engagement with the challenging history of our city, Montgomery, Alabama. The course employed four evidence-based strategies for character formation in higher education: reflection on personal experience, engagement with virtuous exemplars, dialogue that increases virtue literacy, and awareness of situational variables. This paper describes our focus on learning about Civil Rights history to develop citizenship and civic virtues, the course's impact on students, our reflections on the course's effectiveness, and recommendations for courses with similar goals.