Character formation: How to Flourish in a Frenetic World 

Ms Kieryn Bateman | Director of Learning

We often hear about how challenging parenting is in our current global context. The frenetic pace of the world and the rapid rate of change present numerous and evolving challenges to our children, making parenting more complex than it has ever been. This frenetic pace can at times lead us to lose sight of the core aspects of humanity, such as community, belonging, and authentic relationships.

As most of our community members would appreciate, a key component of the Loreto Normanhurst Student Growth Model is our holistic approach to learning. Whilst holistic learning has become a trending buzzword for many in a school and education system in the past decade, it is something that we have carefully developed and honed over the past two decades at Loreto Normanhurst. Recent developments in educational theory and psychology reinforce our model, echoing the necessity of the role of teachers in ensuring the wellbeing of students. Dr Jean Clinton, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, advocates passionately for the power of relationships in the classroom; through her work in neuropsychiatry, she asserts that if students feel emotionally and psychologically safe, if they belong and have a sense of purpose, then we are creating the optimal learning environments for them to flourish.

Such was the focus of a recent professional development session that was delivered in our staff Open Learning Circles program, where our Director of Pastoral Care, Ms Sally Munro, described social emotional learning as the other side of the report card! In this professional learning module, staff were guided through research and theory that illustrated the necessity of growing the ‘whole’ student to ensure that they flourish in the academic domain. Indeed, our founding sister of Australian Loreto schools, Mother Gonzaga Barry IBVM, understood in the 19th Century that holistic care is an essential ingredient in enabling students to flourish. For Gonzaga, education was about forming character and creating the optimal conditions to do this. Historical documents illustrate that she was passionate about drama, producing many plays in which the children participated, and her main idea was to touch the children’s hearts and to uplift them, indeed, to provide them with a sense of purpose (McCullough, 2023).  She often said: “There is no better time for discovering and developing character than when preparing for a play.” It is evident that Gonzaga understood character formation and the holistic growth of a child to be the key to flourishing.  

With such historical foundations, our school is perfectly positioned to focus on our students' character formation. Our recent work in the realm of Deep Learning across our curriculum has allowed our teaching staff to embed the key competency of character formation into their learning design. Across Integrated Learning, English, Religious Education, PDHPE, History and Social Science, students have been required to focus on key dimensions of character development in a breadth of learning experiences. These experiences range from developing empathy, compassion, and integrity in action through immersion experiences such as Year 9 Far North Queensland and Year 10 Homelands/Canberra, to Year 7 and 8 Integrated Learning - experiences that require students to focus on their own grit, tenacity and perseverance in problem solving challenges.

In the words of Dr Jean Clinton, providing students with the opportunity to focus explicitly on the competency of character formation “immunises and protects [them] against social and emotional difficulties, thus building positive mental health and resilience...”   As a community we are so fortunate to have these historical and academic foundations on which to build optimal learning environments; as such, our parents should be reassured that our model of learning is equipping our students to flourish in this frenetic world.