Letter From the Editor

Abstract

Welcome to JEE issue 45(1). This issue includes a number of diverse articles exploring key topics concerning experiential education in a range of disciplinary contexts. Before I introduce the articles, I want to draw readers’ attention to the Call for Editors for the Journal of Experiential Education, on the pages immediately following this letter. My term expires in 2022, and the Journal’s parent association, the Association for Experiential Education, is seeking to recruit an editor or editorial team to lead the JEE into its next phase. It’s an especially exciting moment for the journal, as our Scopus CiteScore places the journal in the top 20%, and we are moving steadily toward attaining an impact factor. I will have more to say before I depart, but I encourage interested parties to apply, or to contact me with questions. The first article, Transformative Design Pedagogy: Teaching Biophilic Design through Experiential Learning by Genell Wells Ebbini, examines students’ understanding of interior design principles founded on the theory of biophilia. Readers will appreciate the graphical evidence Ebbini offers in support of the study’s main findings, which provides an excellent example of how to methodically approach the study of experiential learning in a disciplinary context. In another example of experiential praxis, Transforming Pre-Service Teacher Perceptions of Immigrant Communities Through Digital Storytelling by Lan Kolano and Anna Sanczyk documents a digital storytelling project wherein preservice teachers used digital storytelling to work with immigrant children on their English language skills. Their multimodal approach provides yet another exciting extension of core experiential learning principles into new, disciplinary contexts. Karen Anderson, Margaret Pierce, and Kathleen McNamara present the rare longterm follow up study, with their article, NUMB3Rs Revisited: Long-Term Impacts of Reimagining Service Learning. Their study provides an outstanding contribution to knowledge of service learning’s effects on early career teachers following their participation during preservice training. The fourth article, Undergraduates’ Motivation Following a Zoo Experience: Status Matters but Structure Does not, by Ashley Heim and Emily Holt, examines biology students’ encounter with a zoo experience using the framework of free-choice learning. The framework of free-choice learning is common in informal STEM contexts, but less so in experiential education; hopefully this study changes that condition, since the two are so closely related. Finally, Paul Shirilla, Craig Solid, and Suzanne Graham present a methodological argument about the benefits of longitudinal designs using multilevel modeling, compared to traditional statistical designs. The Benefits of Longitudinal Data and Editorial