I am honored to be the new Vice President of Division K and look forward to working with you to continue the important work that Kathy Schultz and her colleagues have accomplished over the past three years. Kathy’s leadership has been grounded in a commitment to social justice and to supporting research that has challenged us to think about our work and our field in new ways.In particular, Kathy has encouraged us to bring teachers’ voices and experiences into our research to open up new forms for our research and new possibilities for shaping the public conversation about teaching.Under Kathy’s leadership, the Division has also created new and vital opportunities for professional development and leadership for graduate students.
As we continue to build on these efforts, I want our research to support expansive visions of teaching and teacher education.Teaching and teacher education have always been situated in complex socio-political contexts. In our current moment, decades of market- and standards-based reforms have eroded teachers’ professional status and intensified teacher turnover.The same reforms have increased the complexity of the teacher preparation landscape, expanding the numbers of routes into teaching that promise easy entry into the profession.These changes have occurred as many states and localities have disinvested in public education across our P – 22 systems, further entrenching persistent racial and economic inequities in educational opportunities and outcomes.At the same time, movements led by diverse communities, youth, and teachers have countered this disinvestment and worked to keep issues of equity and social justice at the center of our debates about teaching and teacher education and our visions of their possibilities.
Given the complexities of this moment, we need to bring the full range of our diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives to bear on the enduring and emerging questions it raises for teaching and teacher education.We continue to need research that addresses questions about what constitutes good teaching in all its dimensions, how teachers can be prepared to enact it, and how teachers’ work can be organized so that all students have equitable access to it.This includes research that identifies the learning-to-teach opportunities in teacher education, K-12 schools, and community settings that enable teachers to enact ethically responsible, culturally sustaining and effective teaching practices in and across diverse school contexts.As our K-12 schools serve increasingly ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse students, we need more research that provides insight into how we can support teachers of color not only to enter and remain in teaching but to transform the profession so that it better serves our students and their communities.Finally, we need research that asks new questions and uses new methods to build our understanding of the challenges and opportunities for teaching and teacher education posed by new technologies, shifting policy terrains, and emerging social movements.
As we engage in this research, I hope we will include youth and their communities, as well as teachers, in our research so that we can address the questions vital to them. We also need to engage across our different theoretical perspectives, methodologies and positionalities so that we can develop fuller understandings of the technical, political, socio-cultural, moral and economic dimensions of teaching and teacher education.Such exchanges are critical to our ability to foster public conversation and policy about teaching and teacher education that promote an expansive vision of teaching and more fundamentally address issues of equity and social justice.By bringing teachers, youth and their communities into our research and engaging across our diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, it is my hope that we will provide new understandings and new insights for action.
Respectfully,
Dorothea Anagnostopoulos
University of Connecticut
dorothea.anagnostopoulos@uconn.edu
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