At their best, community-engaged and global learning experiences do more than broaden students’ horizons. They challenge assumptions, deepen understanding and shape how students engage with a complex and interconnected world.
A three-year, $750,000 Institutional Impact Grant from the Educating Character Initiative, a project of The Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, supported by Lilly Endowment Inc., will allow Cornell to explore how community-engaged learning can more intentionally cultivate cultural humility as a foundation for ethical practice and civic participation.
Cornell is among 49 colleges and universities selected for long-term projects focused on advancing character education for undergraduates. Led by the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, Cornell’s project will examine how students develop cultural humility through community-engaged learning, global experiences, athletics and other high-impact educational opportunities.
“We need to understand what kinds of reflection, dialogue, relationships and educational design help students learn to work more responsibly across difference,” said Julie Ficarra, associate teaching professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and a member of the project team.
At Cornell, cultural humility – a commitment to critical self-reflection and lifelong re-evaluation of assumptions in varying cultural and community contexts – is already an established learning outcome in community-engaged learning programs.
Going beyond exposure to different cultures or viewpoints, cultural humility is an ongoing, relational practice of self-reflection, awareness of power and positionality, openness to learning from others and a willingness to reconsider one’s own assumptions. This project approaches cultural humility not simply as an acquired skill, but as a character disposition developed over time.
Cultural humility, Ficarra said, adds other questions beyond “What can I contribute?”, such as “What knowledges live in this community? What assumptions am I bringing with me? How can I use my position to amplify the voices of the people most affected by this work?”
The grant builds on a $50,000 Capacity-Building Grant awarded to Cornell in 2025. During that pilot phase, faculty and staff worked with doctoral student Emma Herrighty to review research on cultural humility and character development, and pilot approaches to cultural humility instruction and assessment.
Over the next three years, Cornell will use the award to implement these findings, adapting an existing eCornell cultural-humility course for student use; launching a faculty institute focused on teaching and assessing cultural humility; providing competitive internal grants; convening a university-wide working group to identify institutional opportunities and barriers; and supporting a faculty research fellow dedicated to measuring student learning and outcomes.
A central question will be how growth in cultural humility can be reliably assessed across different educational settings, such as coursework, research, study abroad and athletics.
“There’s not necessarily going to be a one-size-fits-all approach here,” said Kelly Whitaker, assistant director of the Engaged College Initiative at the Einhorn Center and co-principal investigator on the project. “Cultural humility involves not only what students understand about themselves, but how they reflect and relate to others. We may have to identify a variety of ways in which we’ll assess student learning depending on the type of preparation that they receive.”
Among the project’s first areas of focus will be global learning programs and Cornell Athletics. Nearly half of Cornell undergraduates participate in an international experience before graduation, while more than 1,200 students compete in varsity athletics annually. The project will help researchers better understand how structured reflection, dialogue, preparation and reciprocal relationships influence what students learn from those experiences.
The award creates an opportunity for Cornell – the only land-grant institution in the Ivy League – to test this approach across colleges, disciplines and student experiences and contribute its findings to the national conversation about higher education, said Basil Safi, M.Eng. ’24, executive director of the Einhorn Center and principal investigator on the grant.
“If we can do this at scale across such a large institution,” Safi said, “then it really sets a model for other universities throughout the country.”
Olivia Hall is a freelance writer for the David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement.
