How to Instill a Love of Learning in Students

I spent nearly every Saturday lunchtime in March and April with a bunch of strangers on Zoom. There were about 12 of us—a young man from Madrid, a middle-aged woman with a cat, a mother with a child who sometimes made an appearance in her home office. I couldn’t tell you how they made a living or what their political views were, but we all revealed something about ourselves and our beliefs through discussions in Spanish about short stories by Latin American authors.

Everyone had their cameras on and showed up having read the texts. My fellow readers challenged my perspectives, and I gained a deeper understanding of the stories through their interpretations. Some people were native speakers. Others, me included, weren’t. But whatever language limitations existed didn’t prevent us from questioning the message of Borges’s “Las Ruinas Circulares” or appreciating the beauty of Monica Ojeda’s “Las Voladoras.”

Our reading group was one of dozens organized by the Catherine Project, a grassroots learning community started by Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John’s College. Hitz’s efforts to form small reading groups online during the pandemic has blossomed into a network of more than 260 reading groups, seminars and tutorials that serve more than 2,000 unique readers. Named after St. Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of philosophers, the project’s mission is to build “communities where learners can find guidance, focus, and friendship in the pursuit of learning for its own sake.” Last year participants engaged with writers such as Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Frost.

As an English major, I was drawn to group discussions and to interpreting texts with others—the challenge of doing it all in Spanish was a bonus. I didn’t ask my fellow readers why they signed up, but you don’t commit to an eight-week reading group if you’re not interested in friendship, focus and learning for its own sake.

Our discussion was facilitated by Elizabeth Gansen, an associate professor of Spanish at Grand Valley State University and one of about 160 Catherine Project volunteers. The groups allow her to engage with literature on a different level than the conversations with her undergraduate students, she told me after the course finished.

“Being with people from all walks of life, all parts of the world, some retired, some young—it’s just like, they bring so much to the table and different ways of connecting to the text,” she said. While she’s been trained to see texts through an academic lens, Catherine Project readers put them into more current and real-life contexts. This, in turn, informs how Gansen leads students in discussing the works. “If I know that I’m going to be using a text for the first time in class, and if the timing works out, I’ll do it for the Catherine Project first,” she says. “In the reading groups, I move much more slowly, more things come up in conversation and then sometimes I’m able to take it back to the classroom.”

I can’t identify the moment I learned to love learning. It may have been sparked by my third-grade teacher, who was a brilliant storyteller. It could have been nurtured by my mom, an educator. Or maybe I was born with it. I’m open to believing curiosity is just part of what it means to be human. Whatever the case, universities have a wonderful opportunity to help students find their own love of learning and start a lifelong practice of cultivating it. A few frameworks are emerging that could help institutions do this.

Colleges have myriad ways to measure academic outcomes, graduation rates and employment status, but Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, argues these metrics “miss the grander visions of flourishing and transformation often embedded in the mission statements of our institutions of higher education.” As a way to recenter institutions on those lofty missions, VanderWeele has developed a way to measure students’ flourishing based on six areas: happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships and financial security. The idea is to help colleges and universities understand if their students find meaning and purpose and, yes, possess a love of learning.

“You treasure what you measure,” VanderWeele said on a recent Inside Higher Ed webcast.

Wake Forest University’s Character and Leadership program teaches students to practice virtues, including compassion, curiosity and courage. It shows them how to reflect on their personal experiences and to wrestle with difficult ideas through dialogue with others. Though a squishy concept, Wake Forest president Susan Wente has described leading with character and integrity as “embracing what is distinctly human: community, creativity, and hope.”

Basically, it’s not being a scoundrel. Wake Forest also provides grants to other institutions to set up similar programs, such as Bryn Mawr College’s Teaching and Learning Character Together: A Partnership Approach to Preparing Students for Lives of Purpose program and the University of Dubuque’s Shaping Character Through the Head, Heart, and Hands: A Vision for Purposeful Living.

The growing popularity of the Catherine Project indicates that people all over the world find meaning in learning from and connecting with strangers. Helping students cultivate their own sense of curiosity and love of learning may be a hard-to-quantify return-on-investment metric, but it’s the kind of thing that shows up years later—perhaps in a Zoom room full of strangers who have all done the reading.