In this chapter, we introduce the NuLawLab’s pedagogical activities and how dignity has played out in the classroom and experiential learning as a method, core value, and outcome. This chapter details the role of the laboratory model in making the connection between real-world problems and legal education, and the NuLawLab’s application of that concept, which focuses on actively and explicitly making connections among scholarship, community projects, and classrooms. To further our work in teaching legal design, we strive to keep our teaching strategies straightforward and accessible, making legal design available to a broader range of students. We’re determined to explore every avenue to expand legal design’s reach and integration into legal education. We aim to collaborate across institutions to elevate the entire field and establish a more innovative legal design community. These goals align with our commitment to fostering a more inclusive, diverse, and inventive legal design community that empowers students to address the intricate challenges of the legal system.

A brief coda situates evolutionary aestheticism within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century debates about aesthetic pleasure and its capacity to facilitate (or hinder) the establishment of a more just society. First, the coda conducts a partial survey of post-1960s critiques of I. A. Richards’s New Criticism and related approaches – critiques in which “aestheticism” often emerges as a byword for solipsism, obscurity, and political quietism. Shifting to more recent work by the literary scholars Isobel Armstrong and Elaine Scarry, the New Left philosopher Kate Soper, and the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, among others, the coda finally suggests that we are witnessing a renewed interest in the transformative potential of taste and the concomitant importance of cultural education.

Far from being cut-down versions of the adult form, children’s dictionaries constitute a distinct genre with their own history and methodology. The chapter charts the development of children’s dictionaries, from Renaissance bilingual dictionaries to the present day, showing how they have evolved to reflect changing perceptions of childhood. It discusses the bewildering range of dictionaries now available for children as they progress from ABCs and picture dictionaries to those for school use and creative writing, including innovative subgenres based on fictional worlds and dictionaries supporting language revitalisation. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, the chapter explores content and page design adapted to engage young readers. It considers how lexicographers aim to reflect the world as experienced by children, from the selection of headwords to the framing of definitions, using dedicated corpora and reading programmes. The tension between descriptive and prescriptive approaches is often acute in children’s dictionaries, for example over the inclusion of slang and taboo words, and lexicographers aim to balance young dictionary users’ needs against adult perceptions of what a children’s dictionary is for.

In this final chapter, we would like to extend the metaphor of the ‘unseen half’ by exploring how sociological theory itself is ‘unseen’ in early childhood, primary and secondary educational contexts, at least outside of pre-service teacher education and academia itself. When stories about education settings, educational-related issues or educational research findings enter the public milieu via the media, there is rarely any explicit acknowledgement of the theoretical perspectives that might have informed the analysis of the story, issue, or ‘problem’. We propose that ignoring these theoretical influences is due less to a lack of theoretical presence and more to theory’s unfortunate relegation to the background as bland, unintelligible, irrelevant or even elitist.

This chapter approaches the history of electric guitar music in sub-Saharan Africa through the perspective of the “new organology,” considering the unique imbrication of materiality and sociality within the cultural work of music. Multiple local and transnational networks impact the work of guitarists, including the movement of musicians, economic systems that circulate instruments, and the circulation of musical knowledge, genre, and instrumental technique. Networks are both embedded in the landscape—such as electrical infrastructure—and lay atop the physical, such as mobile data and social media applications. The author draws upon ethnographic interviews with guitarists from Ghana and Congo to show how these networks of circulation and the materiality of instruments can provide new ways of thinking about guitar music in Africa and the African diaspora.

This chapter explores the relationship of the adult essay with the ‘theme’, which was the name for school-essays until the mid-nineteenth century. Themes were, mostly, short prose pieces, focused on a moral subject which was also called a theme, written almost exclusively in Latin until English themes began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, the modern pedagogical essay emerged out of the Erasmian theme, combining many of its structures with the Baconian essay’s priority on individual experience and ideas. Meanwhile, the Romantic essayists, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, chief among them, created the modern literary essay by carrying forward the priority the theme assigned to rhetoric over experience, while on the other hand imitating Montaigne’s play with the oratorical structures of the theme, and with its subject (also called a ‘theme’).

To support experiential learning, HLVC data are available for research (by permission, and with protections for the participants). This chapter illustrates the integration of research and community-engaged learning, which is critical to the success of the project. It presents activities that support critical and creative thinking, enable theoretical knowledge to be empirically tested, and facilitate and enhance quantitative reasoning, information literacy, and the communication of research. It includes a section on how to best conduct and teach research methods to support the vitality of the languages being examined and one on ethical practices. Sociolinguistics trails other subfields in analyzing data outside the majority language (English). With these supports, students can change this situation. The exercises exemplify tasks that students have undertaken and can help others get started. Exercises provide prompts and show how to gain access to instruments and data. In addition, the course Exploring Heritage Languages, which has modules that can be (adapted and) used, is introduced. The HLVC corpus and these modules provide instructional infrastructure to scaffold undergraduate and graduate class assignments teaching relevant theory and research skills.

Chapter 2 summarizes the findings of a research project conducted by Petcoff in which she explores using emoji as a viable literacy and postsecondary writing teaching tool. Her work chronicles the teaching situation in a Texas community college, whereby an integrated reading and writing project was devised in which students attempted to demonstrate mastery of State-mandated literacy content areas using both traditional writing and the emoji code. The project provides data-driven findings that allow for the exploration of semioliteracy as a teaching approach, as well how the shared meanings of emoji by students constitute an unconscious semiotic domain. The Petcoff study offers opportunities for further research with similar groups of learning, via iconographic tracking and rendered ecologies with a particular focus on advancing literacy within the framework of first-year and postsecondary writing instructional efforts. Parallels between semioliterate qualities used in reading and writing instruction and healthcare, as well as healthcare professional education, are discussed at the conclusion of the chapter.

The first chapter begins the project of weaving together the commentaries of Proclus and Olympiodorus, and argues that both commentators attempt nothing less than a transfiguration of the human soul and its reorientation toward the desiderative longing characteristic of the contemplative life, the consequence of which is their student’s ascent through the hierarchy of virtues that Neoplatonic pedagogy coordinates with the reading of particular Platonic dialogues. The Alcibiades I, with the commentator’s direction, is the doorway through which an initiate must pass, enduring a cleansing that shepherds him toward the sanctum of the real. The Neoplatonic analysis of the dialogue’s thematic structure is also adumbrated: Socrates proposes that Alcibiades change how he lives only to undermine what he wants and finally concludes that Alcibiades is misguided about both because he assumes a mistaken conception of who he is. This progression is itself framed on both sides by eros.

This introduction frames the entire project, the purpose of which is to excavate a sense of erotic striving from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Platonic Alcibiades I and to argue that its arousal is the beginning of the philosophical life. Proclus and Olympiodorus, inheritors of the commentary tradition that begins with Iamblichus and traces its roots even further back to Plotinus, insisted that their students read the Alcibiades I first of all of Plato’s dialogues because of its emphasis on self-knowledge. They themselves, modelling what they witnessed in Plato, awakened their own students to what it is to be human and directed them accordingly. Self-knowledge, which by the end of the dialogue becomes identification of self with soul, is, in the hands of the commentators, the beginning of psychoerotic metamorphosis, a conversion of initiation that, when properly channelled, seeks wisdom as its sole desideratum.

The Cambridge Platonists’ philosophy of religion might be summed up as a tension between their commitment to the fixed nature of reason and goodness on the one hand and a commitment to freedom and distaste for all forms of tyranny and imposition on the other. This last chapter contends that the Cambridge Platonists not only acknowledge this tension, but embrace it, revelling in the paradoxical way that absolute fixedness and absolute freedom come together at the highest levels of being. This is made possible by what Stephen Darwall (writing specifically of Cudworth) has identified as an early theory of ‘practical reason’. This Platonic theory of practical reason draws together all the elements of the Cambridge Platonists’ outlook considered in earlier chapters – moral realism, divine communicative intent, and participatory epistemology, illustrating the extent to which this Platonic outlook binds together not only the thought of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith but also runs through each of their views on different philosophical topics such as obligation, freedom and pedagogy.