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This chapter describes the democratic philosophy and progressive education writing of John Dewey as sources of wisdom and guidance for the development of schools and classrooms where diverse groups of students live and learn together. The primary emphases are Dewey’s concept of moral equality, his understanding of democracy as a way of life, and his work with the teachers at the University of Chicago Lab School on a curriculum that analyzed tackled the central challenges of community life. Dewey offered useful theoretical work on liberal democratic communities while developing a relevant curricular example of how schools can focus learning activities on the promise and problems of society.

William Baumol is best-known as an academic. He was a prodigious researcher and publisher of texts on microeconomic theory, and a highly regarded educator with roles as head of the Department of Economics at Princeton University, director of the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics and director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at New York University. Less well-known were his engagements as a corporate consultant, notably for the telecommunications monopoly AT&T. Baumol’s work as an advisor, expert witness and theorist for AT&T spanned three decades from 1966. His relationship with AT&T arguably forms the context within which we can better understand his work on contestability theory, which he developed with a team of economists working for AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1970s. Contestability theory was later deployed as a policy tool to justify industry deregulation and even advocate for monopolies and oligopolies on the ground that they were optimally efficient industry structures if potential competitors faced low barriers of entry. Baumol’s intellectual contribution to contestability theory was arguably influenced by the Chicago school and by AT&T’s drive toward the technological integration of telecommunications. Contestability was a rebellion against economic orthodoxies concerning competition and government regulation, and the status quo within AT&T which opposed market competition on the ground that it threatened the technological integration of the Bell system. The outcome was a revolution in industrial organization that would pave the way for the emergence of platform business models incorporating multi-sided and two-sided markets as exemplified by Amazon and Uber.

This chapter describes the transition of a nursery school to a laboratory school. Dissatisfaction on the part of populations involved with the nursery school led to an extensive self-study, the results of which indicated several forms of discontinuity. The program was restructured through initiating structural changes and articulating missions congruent with those of traditional laboratory schools. Actions specific to educating and training students, conducting scientific inquiry and research, and implementing best practice and educational innovation also were taken in order to address the new missions and achieve higher levels of continuity. Throughout the chapter the difficulty and necessity of linking theory and research with practice and innovation are highlighted.

The theory–practice relation in professional programs like teacher education should be a fruitful challenge that inspires students to learn through reflecting on practical experiences with theoretically based concepts. However, instead of being a learning-promoting challenge it often is a problem that causes students to consider leaving teacher education.

Universities and colleges have developed different strategies to make the theory–practice relationship easier for students to handle. One of these strategies is to introduce a third learning space between theory at college and practicum experiences. A Danish university college developed a so-called Teaching Lab to establish a laboratory-like relationship between theory at college and practices in schools. Observations and interviews showed that the college managed to realize its goal and bridge the gap between theory and practice.

This paper provides a general comparison between the ethos, methodological mission, and theoretical standpoint of the New Iowa School, established by Carl Couch and his students and Second Life, a three dimensional virtual world that invites particular forms of sociation. Despite differences in orientation and purpose, as well as biases in communication, we propose that the methodological and conceptual emphasis underlying the research generated from New Iowa School experimental studies can provide a useful framework for research into the virtual worlds created in Second Life. In the course of citing similarities and differences between the New Iowa School and Second Life, we also note that contrived worlds in laboratories and virtual worlds in user domains not only have relevant analogical processes to outside, in situ social worlds, but consist of social stages for performances that have application to the various social stages constructed by actors in the real world. In conclusion, we suggest that the New Iowa School and Second Life represent different but compatible realities in their own right, that the conceptual depth associated with the New Iowa School can inform research into Second Life interactions, and that each offer insights into the external worlds inhabited by real actors who navigate across time and space in their everyday lives.

This narrative inquiry examines teachers' influences on undergraduate/graduate students who enrolled in STEM programs and intended to enter STEM careers. Three National Science Foundation (NSF) scholarship grants sat in the backdrop. Narrative exemplars were crafted using the interpretative tools of broadening, burrowing, storying and restorying, fictionalization, and serial interpretation. Three diverse students' narratives constituted the science education cases: one from teacher education, another about cybertechnology, and a third involving cybersecurity. The influence of the university students' former teachers cohered around five themes: (1) same program-different narratives, (2) in loco parentis, (3) counterstories, (4) learning in small moments, and (5) the importance of the liberal arts in STEM education. The students' narratives form instructive models for their siblings and other students pursuing STEM degrees/careers. Most importantly, the multiperspectival stories of experiences capture the far-reaching impact of “unsung teachers” whose long-term influence is greatly underestimated by the public.

To fulfill their economic and social missions, it is imperative yet challenging for hybrid ventures to demonstrate legitimacy (fitting in) while simultaneously projecting distinctiveness (standing out). One important means for doing so is by adopting and promoting the recent B Corporation certification. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of the emergence of this certification, we argue that when it comes to promoting their businesses, hybrid ventures should not adopt a one size fits all approach. Rather, their promotion strategies need to be adapted to their specific contexts. We theorize and develop a typology of certification promotion strategies for hybrid ventures based on the relative prevalence of other hybrid ventures in the same regions and industries. We conclude by articulating why the B Corporation movement is a rich and underexplored context for scholarship on hybrid ventures, and highlight several promising future research directions.