Concept formation in the wild may be understood as dialectical interplay of evolution and design. Formative interventions such as the Change Laboratory operate in zones where evolution and design meet. Their message may be condensed as “Do not try to dictate the shape of change; get involved in it and allow your own preconceived ideas be transformed in the process.” This requires first of all participatory analysis of the historical development of the contradictions at hand. It is the contradictions experienced and identified by the participants, not the vision of the interventionist, that give direction to the change effort. The second condition is object-orientation. When the object is kept in focus and given a voice, the interventionist’s preconceived ideas are challenged and often fade into the background.

Research has established critical consciousness (CC) as an important developmental competency, yet less is known about how to promote it, particularly for privileged youth. Service-learning experiences hold promise as context of CC development, but more research is needed to understand if they foster CC, for whom, and under what circumstances. This study examines the development of CC within what we term a critical service learning experience: the Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, and Strength (ROSES) advocacy program. We connect specific features of this experience to expected growth in CC components among a group of educationally privileged university students serving as advocates for juvenile legal system-impacted girls. We delineate how engagement with ROSES is likely to influence critical consciousness among advocates themselves, then leverage exploratory data from advocates to empirically examine changes in CC over the course of ROSES. We examine changes in advocates’ interpersonal skills, critical reflection, critical motivation, and critical action as a result of participation in ROSES. We discuss patterns in these findings and examine how key characteristics of advocacy intervention implementation influenced skill development. We end by theorizing further on mechanisms of change in CC due to ROSES program participation and other service learning experiences.

Undergraduate research in nursing has demonstrated effectiveness in producing emerging scholars and leaders for the profession by nurturing the spirit of inquiry, creativity, and collaboration needed to advance the profession. Undergraduate research in nursing opens a window of creativity, mentoring, longitudinal relationships, and inspiration for the bright and gifted students entering the profession. The diverse nature of nursing provides a broad spectrum of transformative research opportunities for nursing students to establish scholarly identity at the launch of their careers. These range from diverse curricular models, clinical research internships, service-learning/global initiatives, faculty-led studies, and interprofessional research collaboration. Nursing theories guide research projects grounded in the discipline. Visionary leadership with adequate resources and a strategic approach to undergraduate research mentoring yield mutually beneficially outcomes in the process of developing requisite skills for graduate studies. Nursing education transformation that fosters a research culture contributes to a bright future with a vision of global significance.

Exercise science is a multifaceted discipline with roots in many different natural science backgrounds.Most concepts associated with it can be made accessible and understandable to the most novice researcher. Students are exposed to knowledge relating to the discipline in the news, at school, during recreational sports, and in general dinner table conversation. This tends to make exercise science research less intimidating and more appealing to students of all backgrounds and majors than traditional sciences such as chemistry and biology. Even though this type of research can include complicated instrumentation that requires extensive training to operate, there are always aspects that benefit from undergraduate participation. In turn, exercise science investigations offer undergraduate researchers a level of accomplishment and responsibility that will directly impact future career aspirations.

A key issue in the field of heritage language education is to ascertain which instructional practices most effectively address heritage language learners’ unique linguistic and socio-affective needs. Previous research on these learners’ profiles has deepened our understanding of the diverse linguistic competencies as well as the cultural backgrounds and experiences that they bring to the classroom. Likewise, recent socioeducational and sociolinguistic scholarship has also underscored the critical roles that identity, attitudes, and motivations play in the development of the heritage language. Combining insights from both research strands, experiential learning/community-based heritage language curricula has recently emerged as an effective pedagogical model that aims to draw on heritage speakers’ knowledge and experiences for the benefit of both the local community and learners. With this in mind, the goal of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the field of community-based experiential learning as it specifically relates to heritage language instructional practices. To this end, we will (i) provide an overview of core topics and relevant research findings, as well as (ii) examine main challenges and opportunities for the field in the years to come.

This chapter examines major views of caring, compassion, and related emotional virtues, fleshing out divergences and convergences across traditions and disciplines, and exploring different understandings of their significance for education. In this chapter, views on these topics are organised in relation to their orientation toward the ‘empathy-altruism’ thesis. The empathy-altruism thesis generally contends that empathy, sympathy, compassion and the like can lead to emotional experiences of fellow feeling and positive relationality toward others, altruistic motivation, and benevolent deeds. It then follows that education should strive to cultivate these other-oriented feelings. Many philosophers, psychologists, and educators support this perspective. However, it faces challenges, also from across fields, among those who focus on the thesis’s limitations and possibly problematic educational implications. When it comes to caring, compassion, and altruism, this chapter shows that while there appears to be a consensus view on the merits of these feelings and related dispositions and actions in education and society, the blanket promotion of these emotional virtues is not altogether unproblematic. In this case, a more critical perspective on the empathy-altruism thesis is defended, as the over-optimistic view of these feelings and dispositions can fail to recognise the risks and challenges that accompany them.