About the LWL Network
The Life Worth Living Network offers fellowships to encourage undergraduate education on enduring questions about the shape of flourishing life. We connect faculty and graduate students like you, who seek to design and facilitate courses that equip students for the lifelong process of discerning the good life. Together, we envision an educational landscape in which students and faculty learn alongside each other how to ask and respond to life’s biggest questions.
Fellowship Benefits
- Pedagogy Workshop: Fellows have the chance to learn alongside other educators in our in-person, week-long pedagogy workshop. This interactive workshop will explore how you can teach in ways that help your students wrestle with and respond to life’s big questions.
- Course Development Roundtable: Our virtual, seven-week-long course development roundtable provides fellows a chance to receive and share feedback with colleagues around the world who share a vision for teaching for transformation.
- Funding: As intentional course (re-)design work takes time, fellows receive funding to empower thoughtful engagement in this work.
- Community: Fellows become members of a diverse community of like-minded teachers who are eager to see students equipped to discern, articulate, and commend visions of lives worthy of our shared humanity.
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The Key Principles of Life Worth Living
Life Worth Living courses are driven by four key principles held in dynamic tension. These principles don’t require instructors to share any particular vision of the good life or comprehensive account of “what education is for.” And they don’t prescribe any particular in-class practices or style. Rather, they act as shared norms that help shape the development of course designs and learning experiences in which students and instructors pursue life’s most important questions together through the respectful exploration of the ‘live options’ presented by diverse interlocutors.
Pursuit of Existential Meaning
We equip students for the lifelong process of discerning and living the answers to the fundamental question of our lives: “What is the shape of flourishing life?” Students are hungry for opportunities to delve into historical and contemporary religious and philosophical answers to the big questions of life, and to rigorously reflect on their own answers within a carefully designed curriculum.
Commitment to Truth-Seeking Pluralism
We include a diverse range of religious and philosophical perspectives—not as mere anthropological data, but as “live options” that make truth claims with bearing on our lives. The social fact of cultural, religious, and ideological diversity around the globe and in our neighborhoods is difficult to make sense of. Many young people confuse the fact of disagreement with the idea that, therefore, there are no answers. We aim to convene truth-seeking conversations about fundamental questions within pluralistic contexts. Ultimately, we strive toward a world where deep reflection on the good life is central to undergraduate education and public discourse in pluralistic communities.
First-Person Engagement
Personal investment is essential to the Life Worth Living approach. We invite students and instructors to ask what makes life most worth living and to reply with their lives. Courses pair rigorous philosophical and religious textual engagement with the tools for examining and shaping students’ own commitments. Discussions and assignments are crafted to inspire dialogue between course texts and lived experience, while guest practitioners lend insight into the particularities of their visions of the good life. As they move through the Life Worth Living approach, students are better equipped to articulate their present, ever-revisable vision of a life worth living and to test the reality of living it.
Participation in a Community of Practice
We attend carefully to convening life-giving, holistic learning communities in which students and instructors together strive to answer life’s biggest questions. We convene life-giving learning communities that offer space for students and instructors to be their whole selves and to marry their most profound existential questions with the best of their intellectual energies. Invited to draw on their personal histories and daily lives throughout the course, participants are taught to critically examine philosophical and religious texts but also each others’ lives. Offering a model of vulnerability, humility, and empathy paired with intellectual rigor, we ask students to hold each other accountable to the pursuit of existential meaning. Cohorts of Life Worth Living students emerge with the courage and tools to have conversations that matter within and far beyond campus life.
Meet the Team
We're building a diverse community of educators committed to revitalizing the humanities with the Life Worth Living approach.
Click here to meet our Project Team & Senior Advisors.
Faculty Course Development Fellowships
For instructors at undergraduate institutions
This fellowship will support you in designing courses that will guide your students through a process of discerning their philosophies for a flourishing life. Apply today for a $15,000 Faculty Course Development Fellowship.
Faculty Fellowship Program Description
The Life Worth Living Network is currently accepting proposals to develop courses that equip undergraduates for the lifelong process of discerning the shape of flourishing life. These courses should be aligned with the “Life Worth Living Approach” (defined above through an articulation of key principles), enlivened by instructors’ passions, and attuned to their campus’s culture, curriculum, and needs.
Proposed courses may be adaptations of existing Life Worth Living courses at Yale University or other institutions; may make use of existing Life Worth Living readings (e.g., Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most); or they may break new ground in terms of course materials and structure.
RESOURCE: Life Worth Living Syllabus Archive
Successful applicants will be supported in the design and implementation of their course through a course development fellowship exploring LWL pedagogical values. The fellowship kicks off with a summer workshop consisting of an in-person teacher formation intensive of approximately one week followed by a seven-week course development roundtable. Travel costs for the in-person intensive are covered separately from the applicant’s fellowship stipend (see FAQs for summer intensive travel costs).
Maximum Honorarium: $15,000
Eligibility for honoraria is dependent upon successful completion of the following milestones.
- $1,500 for participation in the one-week summer intensive in-person teacher formation workshops
- $1,500 for participation in ongoing summer virtual course design roundtables
- $3,000 upon October 1st submission of a revised course design based on feedback received through the course design roundtable series
- $4,500 upon submission of a complete course proposal to your institution
- $4,500 upon submission of interim reports, surveys, and a final report.
Invite your students to discern the shape of flourishing life.
The Application Process
The deadline for consideration for the current cohort is December 1, 2023. The timeline is as follows:
- Deadline for proposals: December 1, 2023
- For courses taught beginning: AY24-25 or AY25-26
- Award decision: February 1, 2024
- In-person pedagogy workshop: Summer 2024 (dates and location TBA)
- Virtual course development roundtables: July, August 2024
- Syllabuses and corresponding materials due: October 1, 2024
There will be a final fellowship competition in fall 2024.
Fellows’ Roles & Responsibilities
Fellowship recipients will be expected to:
- Participate in a hybrid teaching workshop, including a one-week in-person pedagogy workshop (summer 2024) and a seven-week course development roundtable during the summer;
- Develop a course to be taught at least twice at their institution;
- Contribute to the development and/or implementation of evaluation tools; and
- Submit a final report at project end.
Selection Criteria
As many as 16 proposals will be selected by the project team for participation in the 2024 cohort. Successful proposals will demonstrate:
- alignment with the “Life Worth Living Approach,” as described in the key principles above;
- attunement to the proposed campus’s culture, curriculum, and needs; and
- feasibility for successful implementation.
Additionally, priority will be given to proposals that help us foster a diverse network.
Successful proposals will be notified no later than February 1, 2024.
Graduate Student Fellowships
For advanced doctoral students
This fellowship is an opportunity for you to gain teacher training and syllabus-designing experience in tandem with the Life Worth Living approach. Apply today for a pedagogy fellowship of up to $4,500 for advanced doctoral students.
Graduate Student Pedagogy Fellowship Program Description
The Life Worth Living Network is currently accepting applications from advanced doctoral students to participate in a hybrid teacher training and course design fellowship. Fellows will design syllabuses and corresponding lesson plans that equip undergraduates for the lifelong process of discerning the shape of flourishing life. These syllabuses should be aligned with the “Life Worth Living Approach” (defined above through an articulation of key principles), enlivened by future instructors’ passions, and attuned to their prospective campus’s culture, curriculum, and needs.
Proposed syllabuses may be adaptations of existing Life Worth Living courses at Yale University or other institutions; may make use of existing Life Worth Living readings (e.g., Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most); or they may break new ground in terms of course materials and structure.
RESOURCE: Life Worth Living Syllabus Archive
Fellows will participate in a pedagogy fellowship exploring Life Worth Living pedagogical values. The fellowship kicks off with a summer workshop consisting of an in-person teacher formation intensive of approximately one week followed by a seven-week series of virtual course development workshops. Travel costs for the in-person intensive are covered.
Note: Yale doctoral students interested in the Life Worth Living Pedagogy Fellowship should reach out to Program Director Matt Croasmun (matthew.croasmun@yale.edu) for more information on what the fellowship looks like for Yale students.
Stipends: Up to $4,500
- $1,500 for participation in the one-week summer in-person teacher formation intensive
- $1,500 for participation in the summer virtual syllabus design program
- $1,500 upon submission of required materials (syllabus, assignment prompts, unit lesson plans, etc.)
Grow as a teacher of the good life.
The application process
The deadline for consideration for the current cohort is December 1, 2023. The timeline is as follows:
- Deadline for applications: December 1, 2023
- Award decision: February 1, 2024
- In-person pedagogy workshop: Summer 2024 (dates and location TBA)
- Virtual course development roundtables: July, August 2024
- Syllabuses and corresponding materials due: October 1, 2024
fellows' Roles & Responsibilities
Fellows will be expected to:
- Participate in a hybrid teaching workshop, including a one-week in-person pedagogy workshop (summer 2024), and a seven-week course development roundtable during the summer
- Create syllabuses and corresponding materials that will be made available to the broader Life Worth Living network.
Selection Criteria
As many as 10 graduate student applications will be selected by the project team for participation in the 2024 cohort. Successful proposals will demonstrate:
- alignment with the “Life Worth Living approach,” as described in the key principles above;
- evidence of preparedness for course design and development.
Additionally, priority will be given to applications that help us foster a diverse network.
Successful proposals will be notified no later than February 1, 2024.
" Life Worth Living is an opportunity to shift paradigm. Is there a way in which you can enhance and enrich your intellectual world to see things differently? Is there a way to build your education in such a way that will, as you learn this knowledge and facts and enrich your mind, are there opportunities to trickle this intellectual wealth of information, richness of information into your soul and heart?"
Imam Abdullah Antepli, Duke University
