From Lecture to Dialogue: Reframing Relationship Education to Foster Moral Agency at a Federal Service Academy

Following a widely publicized institutional crisis involving legacy relational misconduct, a federal service academy redesigned its relationship education program by shifting from large-scale compliance lectures to structured, dialogic engagement emphasizing role play, peer deliberation, and values-based reflection. Drawing on moral development theory, social learning theory, dialogic pedagogy, and scholarship on civic formation in higher education, this manuscript presents a conceptual analysis of the redesign. Rather than reporting outcome metrics, the article examines how moral rehearsal, language modeling, and developmental scaffolding may cultivate moral sensitivity, boundary recognition, and bystander efficacy. The analysis argues that institutional culture change requires participatory pedagogy aligned with leadership identity formation and collective norm construction.