For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the exploration of fostering intellectual humility in educational settings.
Much of the goal of education is about getting students to know things — to be informed discussion participants or well-prepared test-takers. But for education to be successful, and for students to flourish in the classroom and beyond, it can be equally important to show students productive ways of not knowing. Intellectual humility, which might be defined as recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and being open to learning from others, has emerged as one of the central virtues of the new social science of character.
Over the next three years, developmental psychologist Tenelle Porter will be leading a series of studies, funded with a $235,000 grant to the University of Pennsylvania from the John Templeton Foundation, to examine how students engage with intellectual humility from elementary school through the start of college. The goal is to increase understanding of how students experience intellectual humility, how they express it, and in what ways they are able to internalize it as a central character virtue.