I am honored to be the new Vice President, and I look forward to working closely with you to continue the wonderful work that Lin Goodwin and her colleagues have accomplished over the past three years. Under Lin’s leadership, the division has focused on social justice and the education of marginalized youth. I am grateful for Lin’s creative use of sessions and meetings, her relentless commitment to social justice and education for all students and teachers, and her generosity and openness to new people and ideas. My goal is to maintain and extend her efforts, as we continue to open up our division to ground-breaking work that informs the teaching profession, reshapes our field, and also prompts us to action.

As we continue to diversify our membership, the topics we address through our scholarly work, and the venues through which we distribute this work, we need to include more teachers in our conversation. I want our research to engage more broadly with teachers' voices and experiences, which also entails being open to non-traditional forms of research, and I want to use those voices and that research to join actively and forcefully in the public conversation about teachers and teaching. This will enable us both to support teachers, who are too often under attack, and to strengthen the teaching profession, which is suffering, in large part as a result of those attacks.

Embracing teachers, as true partners in our work will only enrich our research. We no longer have the luxury of conducting research on teaching and teacher education simply to theorize. If we think of our field as both theoretical and applied, with a variety of constituents contributing to both aspects, then we are compelled to rethink conventional understandings of the boundaries between research and practice, researchers and practitioners.

Rethinking these conventional understandings can, in turn, help us extend our influence beyond the K12 and university classroom. Current teacher shortages across the U.S. suggest that the profession of teaching has become less desirable than it was in the past. Engaging with teachers through an expansive and inclusive notion of our scholarship can help us both to understand and to address this worrisome trend and the policy decisions that have helped fuel it. I look forward to continuing our efforts to make our division a place where hard questions are considered and successes celebrated, where new ideas are tested and new findings, along with their implications, are revealed. Most importantly, I want our work to continue to support and promote the crucial work of teachers and their profession.

Dr. Kathy Schultz
Division Vice President
katherine.schultz@colorado.edu