Below you’ll find one of two abstracts submitted to the Jubilee Centre’s 2026 annual conference. You can find the other abstract here. Neither were accepted.
In the abstract, I propose mapping the Jubilee Centre‘s three strategies of character “caught”, “taught”, and “sought” onto Self-Determination Theory’s (SDT) three basic psychologcal needs: relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Specifically,
- Character “caught” helps students feel connected to others (relatedness);
- Character “taught” helps students feel effective and capable (competence); and
- Character “sought” helps students feel in control of their behaviour (autonomy).
I go on to expore several implications of this mapping. I’ll reiterate just two here:
First, the Jubilee Centre’s Character Teaching Inventory present 70 strategies that practitioners in character-focussed schools perceive as effective. But do they actually work? The proposed mapping allows these strategies to be evaluated more rigorously, using SDT’s well-established methods and measures.
Second, SDT assumes that humans naturally tend toward flourishing – but it is largely agnostic about what flourishing actually looks like. This may be due to concerns about the naturalistic fallacy – crossing from facts into values, let alone prescriptions. Character education, grounded in virtue ethics, helps fill that gap. It suggests that flourishing involves developing and expressing virtues such as honesty, kindness, bravery, and so on (see Key concepts).