Spreading the Word

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At the Lynch School, we have a deep sense of community because of our shared mission. Our students and faculty thrive in an environment of collaboration and purpose.”

—Stanton Wortham

Boston College has always felt like home to Stanton Wortham. He grew up just 10 minutes away, in West Roxbury, and as a high schooler he took summer classes at the Heights, worked out at the Plex, and even got into occasional trouble on campus—the nature of which we will not share on these pages. 

Today, Wortham is solving problems, rather than creating them, as the Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education and Human Development—the top-ranked Catholic school of education in the country. In his nearly decade-long tenure, he has recruited six of the school’s seven endowed chairs, revitalized its master’s programs, and founded its innovative department of formative education. With the launch of two new initiatives, Wortham is embarking on an ambitious mission to make the intangible gifts of Jesuit, Catholic education known across the globe.

In Wortham’s view, Boston College and the Lynch School can do more to herald their celebrated Jesuit, Catholic model of education. “We [… ought to tell] the world about the sort of distinctive approach that we take,” he says. “We focus on our students’ emotional state, their relational state, their ethical and spiritual states. People in our institution understand this, but others out in the world [… often do not].” In order to spread the word, Wortham has launched the Transformative Education Lab—an initiative dedicated to sharing the University’s research and best practices in formative education. The lab, which began operating in Summer 2025, will host conferences, highlight pioneers in the field, and create multimedia projects that tell stories about holistic, formative approaches to education. “The goal is to break through the very crowded media landscape out there and communicate what is special that’s being done here and what we’re particularly good at,” says Wortham.

Whereas the Transformative Education Lab looks inward at BC’s own culture of formation, the second initiative, Global Researchers Advancing Catholic Education (GRACE), shines a light on formative education practices at other Catholic schools around the world. “Through GRACE, we can show what Catholic schools are doing particularly well, hopefully leading more kids to want to attend these schools,” says Wortham. “All over the world—in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, the UK, South America—people have started to figure out that schools have been too focused on vocational skills and narrow cognitive outcomes, like tests of math and literacy,” he explains. “We’re trying to show that Catholic schools never forgot about that other stuff. They’ve been doing holistic, formative education all along.”

Wortham is no stranger to ambitious media projects like the Transformative Education Lab, nor to cross-cultural dialogues like those facilitated by GRACE. Before joining the Lynch School, his creative use of film helped educators in Norristown, Pennsylvania, better understand the community they served. Wortham spent a decade working with the public school district in Norristown, a city with a sizable community of Mexican immigrants. Drawing from his knowledge of Spanish, he quickly understood that many teachers who only spoke English failed to appreciate the complex and multifaceted values and aspirations of these immigrant families. “We would get teachers, generally well-intentioned people, saying the same thing to us: ‘These parents don’t care if their kids learn anything in school. They just want them to learn English, get a job, and drop out.’ But we knew that wasn’t true, because we had talked to these parents, and that was not what they were saying,” says Wortham. “They wanted their kids to finish school; they wanted them to have a better life than they had.” 

He developed a creative solution to the problem: he filmed his conversations with these parents, added English subtitles, and prepared a short film for the leadership at the school district. “We showed it to teachers; we showed it to the principal and the superintendent. It showed them what the community was really thinking,” he says. Wortham went on to further explore cross-cultural interactions in Norristown as executive producer of Adelante, an award-winning documentary that showcases how the integration of Mexican parishioners helped to revitalize the predominantly Irish-American St. Patrick’s Church.

Wortham’s multimedia savvy and global focus are key to spreading the word about formative education. Maybe that’s why, when he does get a chance to step away from work, his pastimes are analog; his attention is local. You might find him kayaking along the tranquil lakes and ponds by Plymouth. But it’s more likely that you won’t find him at all. “There’s a particularly nice place where I kayak, but I won’t share what it’s called, because then lots of people will show up,” he says, smiling.