Character education happens everywhere.
Santo Domingo, Merida, Venezuela June 5th, 20025
🎨 The best character education lessons can take place while painting.
At the end of April, we invited our friend, artist Loto Araujo, back to Santo Domingo — the town in the Venezuelan Andes where she’s offered art workshops for the bird conservation initiative Mirada de Aves/Bird’s Eye-View, and where we’re piloting the youth positive development program Empowered.
This time, her mission was to teach watercolor techniques to a few art-loving high-school students from each of the six classrooms involved in the program Empoderad@s, and co-create four posters around the values and virtues that students and teachers deemed most important in their daily lives. These values were Hope, Wisdom, Empathy, and Peace.
Loto arrived with a suitcase full of high-quality watercolor paper, brushes, paints—and her characteristic wisdom, empathy and humanity.
🖌️ On the first day, she led a class on how art can express emotion and ideas. The group explored inspiring works from around the world, analyzing how pattern, depth, and color can carry feeling and meaning.
🖼️ On day two, students developed sketches, drafts, and painted four final pieces.
One painting—Esperanza (Hope)—was created in intricate detail by a student who is mute. “That’s how everyone call her at school,” the girls told Loto, who asked, “Does she have a name?” “Yes,” they replied, “but that’s just what we call her—and she doesn’t mind.” Loto paused: “Just because she’s used to it doesn’t mean she likes it. Have you asked her? Don’t you think it would be more respectful to use her name? How would you feel if you were in her position?”
The girls told stories that ratified the importance of Empathy in their lives. That question especially struck a chord with the student who painted Hope, who served as an interpreter for her deaf friend. She spoke up about how empathy in school can be life-changing. She’s an excellent student who plays volleyball and that Loto described as a brave and resilient, specially after she later found out that her mother is undergoing treatment for leukemia.
As both research and popular knowledge show, the best way to «teach» character is to embody it.
💬 This was underscored by Krista Mehari, PhD in a The Greater Good Science Center article that described the original implementation of the Empowered program in Alabama. “A girl told us that her favorite part was when the facilitator’s husband came into the room—not part of the curriculum—because he was always kind to the facilitator. She had never seen a married couple be kind to each other before. For us, it was a powerful reminder: what’s not in the program might be the most important part.”
Experiences like these highlight one of the greatest challenges—and opportunities—of character education: helping teachers and facilitators show up as kind, empathetic supportive adults in the lives of students to become the kind of teacher students never forget.
Laboratorio de Educación holistica 