Middle school students' perceptions of character education: What they are doing when someone is

Abstract

This paper reports on the ways in which a group of middle school students who received character education in elementary school define and experience character. The research was designed to improve our understanding of the meanings that the children ascribe to their character lessons in the long term, and to determine whether they see connections between these lessons and their experiences with character in middle school. The data come from interviews with 24 children who attended five different elementary schools in one town that used the Character Counts! curriculum at the time of the study. The students were questioned about their understanding of the curriculum and their own personal experiences with character-related issues in middle school. The results demonstrate that the elementary school character lessons are carried forward. Children are able to recall the formal meaning of many of the character traits that they studied. As they graduate to middle school, however, peer culture assumes an increasingly important role and their lived experience of character become more complex. Thus, the preteens studied here are actively working to reconcile the differences between character as a “learned,” and then a “lived” experience. While maturation and character lessons received beyond school may confound these findings, the results presented here suggest the need to bridge, and then perhaps adapt character programming to empower adolescent input and embrace the role of peer culture in defining and then redefining character.

Citation

Hudd, S.S. (2010), "Middle school students' perceptions of character education: What they are doing when someone is", Beth Johnson, H. (Ed.) Children and Youth Speak for Themselves (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 267-293. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-4661(2010)0000013013