Linfield College

Abstract This study examines the impact of service-learning on linguistic and cultural development among 29 Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners enrolled in a second-semester heritage course in the Pacific Northwest. Given the increasing population of Latine/Hispanic students, universities have expanded course offerings to address SHL learners’ distinct linguistic abilities and socio-affective needs. This research examines how service-learning – an experiential approach combining community engagement with academic study – supports SHL learners’ growth. Through written reflections, questionnaires, and exit interviews, findings reveal that participants improved linguistic confidence and proficiency, strengthened cultural ties, and enhanced professional skills. Students also reported meaningful connections with the Latino community, increased purpose, and greater clarity in career aspirations. The study concludes that integrating service-learning into SHL curricula offers a transformative educational experience, bridging academic and community engagement while addressing SHL learners’ unique needs. These results underscore the value of experiential learning in developing linguistic, cultural, and professional competencies.

Applying sport psychology evidence and expertise contributes to the effectiveness of clinical practice in the professions of athletic training and athletic therapy (ATAT). Experts and scholars from athletic training, athletic therapy, and sport psychology research and consulting contributed examples of evidence-based practice (EBP) applications around nine broad areas of clinical practice in ATAT: creating caring climates, demonstrating cultural competence, educating patients and professionals, collaborating with the healthcare team, motivating patients for rehabilitation adherence, integrating mental skills, assessing patient-reported outcomes, referring patients for mental health concerns, and making clinical management decisions like return-to-play (RTP). Applying these concepts strengthens clinical practice effectiveness and benefits the many and diverse patient populations served by athletic trainers and athletic therapists (ATs).

This research examined potential matching patterns between romantic partners in Big Five personality traits and relationship-specific characteristics such as attachment orientations, caregiving systems, conflict resolution, partner responsiveness, and trust. We analyzed two existing longitudinal studies that had complementary samples: 184 couples who had dated for less than one year and 168 married or cohabiting couples across the first two years of parenthood. We found evidence for assortative mating across various relationship-specific characteristics both at baseline and longitudinally, which were often stronger in magnitude than assortment based on Big Five traits. However, couples often perceived each other to be more similar than their actual similarity indicated. Further, there was little evidence to support the benefits of between-partner similarity for relationship quality after controlling for actor and partner effects of both partners’ score levels on each construct. We highlighted the importance of including personality assessments beyond one-time, self-reported measures of Big Five traits in investigating assortative mating processes.

Management of sport-related concussion (SRC) has undergone significant changes over the past decade. Recommendations have shifted from a rest only approach during recovery to incorporating exercise as a therapeutic intervention. Athletic trainers (ATs) are health care professionals who are often responsible for the recognition, evaluation, and management of these injuries. While previous research has investigated multiple aspects of athletic trainers' knowledge and utilization of best practice recommendations, no study has examined their use of exercise during the symptomatic period of concussion recovery. PURPOSE: This study aimed to explore the experiences of collegiate ATs who regularly prescribe exercise to their patients as part of their concussion management protocol. METHODS: A phenomenological approach to qualitative inquiry was used. Through purposive sampling, athletic trainers known to the researchers were invited to participate. Eight ATs who were identified as implementers (those regularly prescribing a structured or semi-structured exercise program) participated in semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis approach was used to analyze the collected data. RESULTS: Six major themes emerged from our analysis of the experiences of athletic trainers: 1) Considerations for exercise; 2) Barriers & Concerns; 3) The exercise prescription; 4) Outcomes; and 5) Resources. CONCLUSION: Participants faced both extrinsic and intrinsic challenges when shifting their concussion management protocols to include exercise during the symptomatic period. There were few negative experiences and the ATs in our study felt their patient outcomes were overwhelmingly positive. Perceived benefits of exercise included improved mood, quicker symptom resolution, and potentially improved recovery time. Team physician involvement was critical to the implementation of using exercise as a therapeutic intervention.

In this interview, Carlos Martínez Assad reflects on his transition from a long career as an academic and historian to an author of fiction, as well as what it means to be Lebanese in Mexico. Before delving into the creative world of novels, Martínez Assad taught as a professor of sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). As a scholar, he has published prolifically (over twenty books and essays) and received numerous prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Medal of Historic Merit, and the Mexican National Prize of Arts and Sciences. His fiction draws heavily from his academic research into Lebanese Mexican history, and he acknowledges that although fiction grants the author artistic license, his goal is to write fictionalized accounts that are still as accurate as possible. His creative process, he states, is one of imagining how history might be duplicated, allowing for a new encounter with Lebanon, lived again with the family left behind.

Acts of extraordinary, costly altruism, in which significant risks or costs are assumed to benefit strangers, have long represented a motivational puzzle. But the features that consistently distinguish individuals who engage in such acts have not been identified. We assess six groups of real-world extraordinary altruists who had performed costly or risky and normatively rare (<0.00005% per capita) altruistic acts: heroic rescues, non-directed and directed kidney donations, liver donations, marrow or hematopoietic stem cell donations, and humanitarian aid work. Here, we show that the features that best distinguish altruists from controls are traits and decision-making patterns indicating unusually high valuation of others’ outcomes: high Honesty-Humility, reduced Social Discounting, and reduced Personal Distress. Two independent samples of adults who were asked what traits would characterize altruists failed to predict this pattern. These findings suggest that theories regarding self-focused motivations for altruism (e.g., self-enhancing reciprocity, reputation enhancement) alone are insufficient explanations for acts of real-world self-sacrifice.

This article explores how two influential 8th-century Indian philosophers, Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla, treat the threefold scheme of learning, reasoning, and meditation in their spiritual path philosophies. They have differing institutional and ontological commitments: the former, who helped establish Advaita Vedānta as the religious philosophy of an elite Hindu monastic tradition, affirms an unchanging “self” (ātman) identical to the “world-essence” (brahman); the latter, who played a significant role in the development of Buddhist monasticism in Tibet, denies both self and essence. Yet, they share a concern with questions of truth and the means by which someone could gain access to it, such as what, if anything, meditation contributes to knowledge and its acquisition. By exploring their answers to this and related questions, including how discursive and conceptual practices like learning, reasoning, and meditation could generate nonconceptual knowledge or knowledge of the nonconceptual, this essay shows the difficulty of separating “philosophical” problems of truth from those related to self-transformation or “spirituality,” as Michel Foucault defines the terms. It also reassesses, as a framework for comparison, the well-known contrast between “gradual” and “sudden” approaches to the achievement of liberating knowledge and highlights them as tensions we still struggle to resolve today.