Racism, racial inequity, and racial violence, including micro-aggressions (slurs and fearful glances) are endemic in modern American society. Finding ways to eliminate or at least mitigate racism and racial violence is important, not only for public safety but also to ensure equality, fairness, and social harmony among every stratum of American…

Study abroad participants, including in short-term programs, often describe their time abroad as "transformative" and a period of intense personal growth. However, the contents of this transformation are often treated by administrators and students themselves as inscrutable, with the fact of having developed intercultural skills and…

21st century early years practitioners are expected to become agents of change by challenging societal inequalities and embracing anti-oppressive approaches. Yet, research suggests that many practitioners hold negative attitudes about children and families who are ethnically, culturally, linguistically and economically different from those in the…

Purpose: This paper aims to articulates how educators are ideal candidates to become "brand ambassadors", triggering dormant qualities to influence behavioral change. The study aims at advocating a call for environmental futures by mobilizing pedagogues for change-making. The research purpose was to deduce insights of real-life…

This study examines the effectiveness of an undergraduate intercultural learning assignment immediately and over time. Students were asked to consider what they know or believe about refugees and the sources of their information. They then engaged in two one-hour online interviews with a refugee. After the interviews, they wrote reflective…

For higher education students, feelings of belonging play an important role in their academic success and overall health and wellbeing. However, few studies to date have examined the contributors to and impacts of belonging experiences among post-secondary students within a qualitative paradigm. Written descriptions of belonging experiences were…

Students often naively assume that pursuing sustainability is necessarily costly and difficult. However, proponents of "weak" or "business-centered" sustainability argue that well-crafted sustainability initiatives may simultaneously reduce carbon footprint and enhance financial performance. This article describes a…

This study addresses the problem of facilitating critical thinking about the real-world complexities that underlie the Sustainable Development (SD) concept among university students of architecture. The Socratic Seminar was adopted because of its characteristic exploratory questions that are closely aligned to the question-types used by the…

Transformative Learning Theory is instrumental in fostering sustained positive change in adult learners as it explains how critical reflection in crystallization processes results in emancipatory learning. Despite its relevance, there is no reliable approach that can systematically produce Transformational Learning for sustainability purposes.…

My study addresses how experiences within the role of a resident assistant (RA) may be related to need for cognition, a measure describing an individual's capacity and desire to engage in effortful thinking. To investigate this relationship, I used a pretest and posttest survey methodology. This methodology allowed me to determine if RAs…

Twenty-first century transformations have taken place within the framework of globalisation of the economy, the spread of information technology and global migration resulting in increased cultural diversity in many societies. This qualitative study investigated perspective transformation in 18 research students, from Australia, Hong Kong SAR, and…

This study provides a thematic analysis of student transformative experience regarding personal and social change in a service learning (SL) course wherein students volunteer in embedded inner-city contexts. Several transformative themes emerged through interpretive analysis of student journals. Especially important to this investigation, we…

The Global Classroom Model (GCM) is a project-based, cross-cultural, and virtual course conducted in partnership between institutions of higher education. Instructors at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the Liberia International Christian College (LICC) co-developed and co-instructed a novel and innovative "Global Agriculture"…

Transformative learning (TL) theory has rarely been used in outdoor adventure education (OAE) research despite many students describing their courses as transformative. In this study, we applied TL theory to OAE to determine whether the outcomes students reported and the activities and processes used on course produce TL. We surveyed 139 National…

This study aimed to examine the effects of different service experiences on the social justice beliefs of 60 Chinese college students with mixed methods. The quantitative results indicated that the participants in two service groups (i.e. for at-risk adolescents and adolescents with cerebral palsy) demonstrated a more significant promotion of…