Centering Empathic Relations and Co-Learning in an Outdoor Education Partnership: “I Know Carneros Creek Loves Me Because…"

Land trusts are an important component of conservation and increasingly seek approaches that integrate social and conservation goals, often through community based partnerships. This article shares the evolution of a partnership between a land trust, elementary school, and university along the central coast of California. It highlights ways that the partnership centers empathic relationships, especially from the perspective of children who otherwise have very limited access to nature. The partnership applies an action research framework through which partners consider how to co-create, co-learn, and meaningful be in community while also documenting “magical moments,” or times where joy and connection occur, with the land and with each other

Book Review: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Book Review: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Pau

Front Matter

Front Matte

Appreciating the Journey: How Roles in the Classroom Influence Undergraduate Teaching Assistants’ Perception of Their TA Experience

The purpose of this study was to gain feedback from our undergraduate teaching assistants on the structure of the teaching assistant practicum and the variety of their duties within their assignments, as well as their appreciation of the experience. As part of a larger program evaluation effort, participating undergraduate teaching assistants responded to a series of questions about the courses they assisted with (e.g., delivery format, number of students enrolled in the course), how many hours each week they dedicated to their role as a teaching assistant, the frequency in which they engaged in 10 teaching related tasks,  and their overall appreciation of the teaching assistant experience. The results indicate that there is a wide variety of experiences these students have, from type of course format, how much time is devoted to their teaching assistant work, and activities they engage in as an assistant. The results of the appreciation statements indicated that overall, teaching assistants appreciated the experience, with strongly agreeing as the most common response. Most students strongly agreed that being a teaching assistant has helped them be a better student, and most agreed they enjoyed their experience in this role. We suggest that the current version of our teaching assistant program leads to positive experiences for our more advanced undergraduate students;  however, we also see areas for improvement moving forward

In Defense of Invention: AI, First Year Composition, and Literacy Narratives

This reflective essay chronicles a semester-long experiment in a multilingual first-year writing course, where traditional invention techniques were juxtaposed with AI-driven outlining. Drawing on my own graduate-school practice of freewriting as a heuristic (Lauer 2004) and Aristotle’s notion of invention, I first guided students through ten-minute freewrites on rhetorical conventions learned at home versus in U.S. classrooms. I then, tentatively, had them submit those freewrites to ChatGPT to generate literacy-narrative outlines—an exercise that conflicted with my belief in writer-generated discovery. Through class discussion and close reading of both AI- and student-generated outlines, we identified how ChatGPT’s pattern-matching produced generic structures that often diverged from students’ rich, culturally specific experiences. This comparison served as a low-stakes introduction to rhetorical analysis and reinforced our Information Literacy outcome by treating AI output as a “secondary source” to be evaluated for relevance, credibility, and ethics. The study reveals that while AI can suggest organizational possibilities, it cannot invent authentically or gauge audience emotion. Ultimately, I argue that genuine invention—and ethical, powerful writing—emerges from students’ unique voices and critical engagement with both human and machine-generated texts

Public Speaking in the Metaverse: Integrating Public Speaking and Extended Reality to Improve Students’ Presentation Skills

With the increased advancement and accessibility of digital technologies, instructors and educators continue to experiment with immersive reality to foster students’ engagement and experiential learning. The use of extended reality (XR) provides new and exciting ways for students to practice various skills — including communication ones — in a safe and realistic environment. In this activity, I describe and reflect on how I integrated XR in my public speaking class with the goal of helping students refine their presentation skills and simulate different speech contexts that would be difficult to replicate in the traditional classroom environment. Students’ experiences suggest that, although XR cannot (and should not) replace in-person public speaking, it can provide meaningful simulations and even help to alleviate public speaking anxiety for unknown and unfamiliar situations

Cultivating Success: 25 Years of Empowering Black Student Retention Through the Transitions Program

In this article, the author delves into the transformative impact of the Transitions Program on student success, illuminating its effectiveness in cultivating strong cultural foundations and fostering a steadfast commitment to retaining Black first-year students. Through the efforts and resources provided through the African American Cultural & Resource Center (AACRC) at the University of Cincinnati (UC), the Transitions Program emerges as a crucial pillar in equipping Black students for not only a successful collegiate journey but also for thriving in their post-college lives and careers. &nbsp

Book Review: The Nature of Inclusive Play: A Guide for Designers, Educators and Therapists

Book Review The Nature of Inclusive Play: A Guide for Designers, Educators and Therapists by Amy Wagenfeld and Chad Kenned