Compass For Uncharted Lives:
A Model for Values Education

Short Summary of Book
In 1986 I began working with colleagues toward an ambitious dream. We committed ourselves to address in word and deed the complex and controversial challenges of values development and values education in higher education. Eventually we recognized that the spiritual dimension of issues was also in need of analysis and research. For more than fifteen years I worked with many colleagues engineering an educational effort to discover ways to meet this challenge. This book is about that proven method of values education. After fifteen years of development, research, and fine-tuning, I am now able to describe and clarify this evolving, effective, operational process that we developed and other institutions can use.

One of the reasons for writing this book is to carefully present our process and methodology, our approach, techniques and reflections. I pull together the hundreds of conversations and meetings, in which participants across the institution and locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally became engaged in our effort. I present this information so that others can continue the process and assess and research what we have done. Because the field of values education and spirituality continues to evolve, the publication of this book will enable others to take our creation and situate it within contemporary research and action. The major accomplishments of the program will become evident. It will also become clearer what major questions remain.


Compass For Uncharted Lives: A Model for Values Education

"I had a 'what if' moment when I got to Kirby's passage about law schools...." Bruce D. Collins, Corporate Council and VP for C-SPAN. More...

The primary source material for this book is my own practical lived experience and the reflection and experience of countless participants from very diverse backgrounds. These participants learned by "doing" and by paying attention to the feedback and reflection process. One of our guiding principles in the design of our instrument was "what works?"

Our goal was to design a program that would be both useful and capable of continually renewing itself. Among the challenges I address are: How do you engage and commit an institution to the mission of values education? How do you get the faculty involved, and keep them involved? How do you provide the faculty with legitimacy, technique, and content necessary for values education? How do you manage to impact nearly every student in your institution? How do you create a community of learners with both students and faculty coming together?

"As both book and model, Compass for Uncharted Lives succeeds on a number of levels, the most obvious of which, perhaps, is its potential to provide an archetype for colleges and universities other than Le Moyne that wish to consider a program of values education. On this issue Kirby is straightforward, depicting not only the Program’s many successes but also its various difficulties, pains, and struggles..." Kevin D. Vinson and Melissa B. Wilson, University of Arizona More...