Philanthropic Paths: An Exploratory Study of the Career Pathways of Professionals of Color in Philanthropy

This study, commissioned by the D5 Coalition, provides a nuanced picture of the career experiences of 43 philanthropic professionals of color ranging from Program Officers to CEOs working in an array of foundations. Through an exploration of the perceptions, analyses, and career histories of people of color working in the philanthropic sector, this study aims to advance the field's understanding of the following questions:What are the career pathways of people of color in philanthropy in terms of how they enter the field and advance to higher levels of seniority?What factors do philanthropic professionals of color view as posing the greatest barriers and contributors to career advancement in the sector?What is the perceived value of and challenges to achieving greater leadership diversity in foundations from the perspective of professionals of color in the field? While not generalizable to the broader population of people of color working in the sector, interviews conducted with these individuals surfaced a set of potentially common points of entry and career pathways among professionals of color in philanthropy, as well as the factors that helped shape those pathways

The educational situation in Utopia: Why what is, is

In this response to Molly Ware’s review of our 2013 book, John Dewey and Education Outdoors, we extend her suggestion that complexity be regarded as an important, generative force in education reform. Drawing on Dewey’s 1933 Utopian Schools speech, we discuss the “level deeper” that Dewey sought as he criticized the method/subject mater dichotomy, which he saw as an artifact of social class carried forward in the form of a curricular debate rather than a natural source of tension that would be productive to democratic education. Dewey radically argued that learning itself contained similar anti-democratic potential. Eschewing the false child versus curriculum dichotomy, Dewey believed complexity as a catalyst for educational action would be achieved by engaging children in historically formed occupations, harnessing the forces that drive technological and cultural evolution in order to spur interest, effort, and the formation of social attitudes among students. Following Ware, we suggest that reformers should seek to understand at a lever deeper the many sources of complexity they encounter as they both challenge and honor what is

From critical to CALM: The development and implementation of a brief unified mindfulness workshop for college students

Dramatic rises in levels of anxiety, stress, and depression in college students have been observed over the past decade and is so pervasive that it has been deemed the College Student Mental Health Crisis (CSMHC). A number of experts have argued that much of this crisis can be attributed to students’ overall lack of basic knowledge of emotions and adaptive emotional processing. To address this problem, this study sought out to develop a brief mindfulness workshop as an intervention for college students to help increase student well-being, decrease anxious and depressive symptomology, and allow for material to be easily internalized. In this study, 67 total participants, all of whom were college students at James Madison University, completed a mindfulness workshop entitled, From Critical to CALM: A Guided Mindfulness Workshop. Stages of this study included the following: 1) Participant recruitment; 2) Conduct the pre-intervention assessment of participants using the Henriques-10 Well-Being Questionnaire (H10WB), the CORE Outcome Measure (CORE-OM), and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item (GAD-7) scale; 3) Conduct the workshop; 4) directly after each workshop, administer a brief “Quiz” to assess the knowledge participants obtained as well as a satisfaction survey; and 5) Conduct the post-intervention assessment of all remaining participants using the same pre-intervention measures along with one qualitative question asking participants to indicate what concept(s)/idea(s) from the workshop they remember learning. Students’ satisfaction of the workshop overall was high and the vast majority of them reported that they would likely use the workshop’s strategies in the future. Two to three weeks after the workshop, students also retained at least some of the key knowledge elements from the workshop. Test-retest results for this study found statistically signficant change in students’ well-being, as indicated by the H10WB. A positive trend on the GAD was also found, but there was no change found on the CORE-OM. Due to the limitations of this study, the results are not able to be effectively interpreted to determine causation. However, given the nature and brief time of the intervention, these results were deemed as encouraging. Further development of the workshop and adjustments to the study will need to be performed to determine if, indeed, the workshop may have succeeded in initiating improvement in well-being, potentially through facilitating mindful awareness of intrapsychic process

The evolution of experiential learning: Tracing lines of research in the JEE

This essay introduces a collection of past articles from the Journal of Experiential Education (JEE) focused on the concept of experiential learning. It outlines the historical trajectory of the concept beginning with human relations training practices beginning in 1946, as it came to be understood as a naturally occurring psychological process and a grounding for pedagogical reforms. The eight articles included in the issue reflect the way JEE authors have contended with problems arising from the concept’s departure from its origins in practice. We suggest that experiential learning’s evolution into a general theory was accomplished by decoupling it from its roots in a particular social practice and ideology, and then focusing on the concept’s technical problems. It is now important for researchers to revisit assumptions underpinning current theory and practice, situate research on experiential learning in wider practical and scholarly traditions, and develop new vocabularies concerning the relationship between experience and learning in educational programs