Letter From the Editor

Abstract

In the first article of issue 44(2), Alan Ewert and Curt Davidson ask how outdoor and adventure education can help people adjust to a post-COVID landscape. They argue that adventure programs can help ameliorate stress and increase coping in a world of uncertainty and anxiety. The issues of risk and resilience are long-running themes in modern society (Beck, 1992), which COVID-19 has accentuated; researchers can start here to examine how adventure education will contribute to these issues in the future. Juan Pablo Román Calderón, Sara Aguilar-Barrientos, Juan Esteban Escalante, Jaime Barbosa, and Alejandro Arias examined how emotional intelligence shaped task performance in student work groups engaged in experiential learning in engineering. Readers will appreciate the study’s implications for workforce preparation in Latin America, insights into emotional intelligence, and understanding of experiential learning. Next, Stephen C. F. Chan, Grace Ngai, Cindy H. Y. Lam, and Kam Por Kwan inquired into the effects of mandatory service learning, finding students with an initial negative reaction to the mandate shifting to a positive impression following service engagement. The results should be heartening to individuals seeking to incorporate service learning into institutional programs, provided it follows principles of best practice. In Contemplative pedagogy: Fostering transformative learning in a critical service learning course, Paula Gardner used a narrative approach to examine an impressive number of written student reflections over 3 years. Gardner’s study reinforces the importance of critical reflection in promoting transformational learning and provides several suggestions on how instructors can incorporate it into their projects. In a highly complementary study, Jennifer K. Wesely explored similar themes in the context of a criminal justice course. Wesely focused specifically on emotions to understand how students can be prompted to work through them in support of critical thinking. The study provides a strong model of how to focus on core elements of experiential learning, specifically the important relationship between emotion and cognition during reflection. Finally, I personally appreciated how Lia Naor and Ofra Mayseless emphasized the role of nature in outdoor therapies, which often is taken for granted or treated as a backdrop during the therapeutic process. Instead of relegating it to a secondary role, they foregrounded how practitioners considered nature to be an active ingredient in outdoor-based therapies. Hopefully, the study encourages researchers to maintain it as a focus in the future. Readers of issue 44(2) are treated to seeing how experiential education is being implemented in a rich array of international and disciplinary contexts. Enjoy!