Abstract
With this issue, our team at Michigan State University completes 6 years of work as Co-Editors of the Journal of Teacher Education. For this final editorial, we looked back across the work published during those years, asking ourselves: What lessons have we learned as a result of this service to the field? The papers published during our tenure have addressed a range of issues important to teacher education including, for example, links to communities, assessment of teachers’ and teacher candidates’ knowledge and skills, impact of policies on preparation programs, features of clinical preparation, and preparation needed for social justice teaching. We not only noted the breadth of topics, frameworks, and authors, but also recognized the need for even greater diversity, with particular attention to the inclusion of scholars and perspectives beyond the United States. Journal issues also addressed the range of knowledge and skills needing to be developed through teacher education, and we hope that in future publications, more scholars will help the research community better understand the complexities of critical knowledge and practices for teaching and teacher education.
One important contribution of the Journal of Teacher Education is the elevation of voices of scholars newer to the field, whose work informs our views of issues through sharing new and different perspectives. Scholars new to the field bring unique and necessary lenses and methodologies to research, supporting us in seeing things that were previously invisible or understood through damaging frames. We might think of these new voices as critical friends whose different perspectives bring honest insight to issues that may have been difficult to see. This exposure to and learning from diverse perspectives require that we consider viewpoints other than our own. By working to consider and understand fresh and different lenses and approaches, we deepen our understanding of the topic at hand. It can change what and how we see multiple aspects of teacher education. Knowing that voices of scholars newer to the field exist is insufficient; we must purposefully seek out those voices and champion them in being heard to best support continuous improvement of our work as a field.
While we made progress on advancing the work of scholars studying teacher education in contexts beyond the United States (e.g., König et al., 2016; Sharkey et al., 2016), there is still more to do in this area. There are many learning environments across the globe where issues of policy and practice in teacher education have not been illuminated. It is in these contexts where we can better understand the points of intersection and distinction in the experiences of educators, students, and families so that teaching, learning, and policy can be strengthened systemically. While the challenge of highlighting diverse voices across educational contexts remains, our 6-year tenure provided several opportunities to advance studies that evidence conceptual, methodological, and epistemological expansions to the examination of challenges and opportunities in teacher education (e.g., Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Lees, 2016; Matias & Grosland, 2016). The continued use of less common ways of being and knowing in the examination of teacher education will remain beneficial to the field moving forward.
One of the most persistent and troublesome issues in teacher education is grounded in the stance toward teaching, particularly in the United States, as well as in many other countries across the globe. Several powerful exceptions to this exist, in such countries as Finland and Japan, among others. As many educational scholars and policy makers recognize, but far more others in education-related positions do not, the work of teachers is informed by a deep and robust body of careful empirical research, and teacher effectiveness is largely dependent upon access to specific supports for continued development of their knowledge and practices as befits all professionals. Our work as editors of JTE has allowed us to address the persistent attacks on teaching as a profession and on teachers as knowledgeable professionals. It has also permitted us, in the articles we have selected and papers and editorials we have written, to make continuing and, we hope, resonant arguments for the power of such professionals and for more thoughtful, meaningful, and inclusive supports which need to be enacted at greater scales.
We also have been able to highlight measures that have promising potential to assess teacher knowledge and learning, while pointing out the need for more such instruments. Some of the research that was published during our tenure documents the power of such assessments, as well as the fact that there are ways to help teacher candidates develop core knowledge and learn essential skills. In addition, we recognize and have documented in the pages of JTE over the past 6 years the fact that teaching is not a mechanical undertaking but rather is a complex, networked, and relational profession. Thus, we must take great care in elevating the knowledges and practices which support this work. One example of this is JTE articles where authors have advised caution concerning the primary focus on core practices (e.g., Philip et al., 2019; Richmond et al., 2017). Another is several articles where authors address the ways that practices can be taught to individuals during their time in teacher preparation programs (e.g., Arbaugh et al., 2021; Jenset et al., 2018), including those practices which have not always been considered “core” to the profession (e.g., Windschitl et al., 2021).
One of our lessons learned as editors is that it is impossible within a single manuscript to adequately account for the complexity of the issues that underlie teaching and teacher education. This means that scholars need to always keep their eye on this complexity as they write, and as we think about how to translate this work into changes in program, curriculum, and policy. Scholars also need to be ready to respond to the ways in which the translation of research to the real world is messy and to advocate for the position that there is no single solution to the challenges of teaching and learning. We encourage authors to continue identifying and addressing important issues, and also encourage them to give attention to how addressing their focal issue fits in the larger context of teacher education practice (e.g., Barton et al., 2020).
We look forward to shifting from our roles as editors to that of being avid readers of the journal, and we are confident JTE will continue to be an outstanding asset of AACTE and an important source of knowledge for researchers and practitioners, providing well-founded insights as we all work to improve practice.