The interactions amongst nucleons and between nucleons and external probes are essential ingredients for solving the nuclear many-body problem. Modern approaches to nuclear structure exploit the spontaneously-broken chiral symmetry of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to constrain the construction of an effective theory. As compared to earlier phenomenological approaches, this has the advantage of straightforwardly prescribing not only the internucleon interactions, but also the electromagnetic and weak interactions of nucleons. This chapter serves as an elementary introduction to chiral effective field theory ( \(\chi \) EFT) and spontaneous symmetry breaking, and presents a derivation of the effective magnetic dipole (M1) and Gamow-Teller operators.