With the progress of digital technologies and applications being used in schools, family and consumer sciences (FCS) educators have a collective responsibility to teach what it means to be a responsible digital citizen in the virtual world. The nine elements of digital citizenship developed by Ribble (2015) offer a framework for teaching students…

The six papers in this special issue focus on how values and values education are embedded in the everyday life at Nordic preschools. The studies in this special issue provide stimulating theoretical and methodological knowledge to inform further study of values education internationally. A key contribution of the papers is that there is…

In this article, Bob Macioci, dean of student affairs at Cushing Academy in Massachusetts, describes the effort to elevate and align character education curriculum with the school's larger mission by the establishment of the Virtue Project, a program that challenges a select group of student leaders to promote and encourage both the intrinsic and…

In this retrospective account of their scholarly work over the past 45 years, Alexander and Helen Astin show how the struggle to achieve greater equity in American higher education is intimately connected to issues of character development, leadership, civic responsibility, and spirituality. While shedding some light on a variety of questions…

Given the prevalence of religion talk in today's world, another form of fluency is needed. Civic multilingualism is the ability to converse across different religious and ethical perspectives in search of understanding, compromise, and common ground. According to the author, this may represent the greatest social challenge of the 21st century.…

This paper focuses on the process, approaches and teacher roles in values education and offers recommendations for teachers. It uses print materials and Internet sources on values education. These sources were analyzed and synthesized to reveal certain cases and/or opinions. In addition to contemporary sources, older reference materials were also…

What roles do religions play in meeting global education challenges? This article explores five potential avenues for action: advocacy, service delivery, pluralism-focused curricula to further religious literacy, theological training for social justice, and addressing values challenges in education. Despite growing contemporary advocacy by…

Respect! Campaign is a learning program adopted by the leaders and staff members of East Side Community High School. It involves students and staffs in a process to discuss and define what respect means in their community. In this article, the author discusses how the school leaders at the school successfully implement the Respect! Campaign and…

This article reports findings from a study of England's most improved academy, a high school in a former mining community serving a designated social priority area. The correlation between academic success and character education based upon the core values of the school is reported with reference to quantitative and qualitative data obtained from…

It is necessary that children are taught pedagogy of peace that includes recognition and rejection of violence, understanding of differences through dialogue, critical awareness of injustice, social justice and imaginative understanding of peace. The prime responsibility of a teacher is to help students to become good human beings, motivated to…

As the director of a new general-education program at the Roman Catholic university where he teaches, the author recently spent time introducing their curriculum to a variety of campus constituencies. On two occasions, members of their Board of Trustees asked him how the new courses would contribute to students' religious development and to the…

Character is defined broadly by leading authorities, including concepts such as practicing apt behavior and teaching right from wrong. Virtue and moral undertones tend to pervade most experts' use of character, although in secular settings, the notion of ethics is more prominent. Overall, developing in students a desire for the good is how most…

Due to the social environment of China's reform and opening up, as well as China's education system with knowledge impartation as its focus, some college students lack the humanistic care and education of value and significance of life. Universities should plan effective activities to make students realize the importance of life. They should…

This article describes briefly the growing emphasis in Australia on values education as evidenced by the Australian Government's National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools (2005), and the responses of the respective States and Territories. Arguing that the major approaches to the teaching of values (the trait approach often…

The "Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century" provides a mandate for discussion of the spiritual within secular state schooling, but this discussion has never occurred. This is a serious omission given what could be called an "undercurrent of concern" for the ways in which young people…