Special Issue Introduction: Making Our Way—Rethinking and Disrupting Teacher Education

PreK-12 curriculums change and evolve. Teaching and learning approaches are not, and should not, be the same as 50 years ago. This call for evolution and change is also critical in teacher education but often not challenged and discussed. This Special Issue, Making Our Way: Rethinking and Disrupting Teacher Education, aims to highlight how people are thinking differently, pushing, challenging, and ultimately disrupting teacher education for good. The articles highlighted in this Special Issue expand the definitions of mastery of knowledge and intellect in educational and schooling spaces. These articles embrace local, embodied, and community knowledge to reimagine teacher education approaches to learning. Ultimately, the articles in this Special Issue are a call to embrace doing and thinking differently for the benefit of all students.

In “Unshackling Our Youth through Love and Mutual Recognition: Notes from an Undergraduate Class on School Discipline Inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coastes and bell hooks”, Comesañas and Fellner initiate this Special Issue by challenging urban educators to rethink who are the purveyors of knowledge and who are the “teachers” in teacher education. In their article, they discuss how high school students are the co-instructors of a teacher education course and disrupt normalized practices in the Ivory Tower. In “Justice-Centered Reflective Practice in Teacher Education: Pedagogy as a Process of Imaginative and Hopeful Invention”, Rosen, Jacobs, Whitelaw, Mallikaarjun, and Rust introduce their justice-centered reflective practice framework as an invitation for other teacher education programs to engage in this critical praxis approach. They simultaneously challenge themselves and others on how best to incorporate liberatory educational work within teacher education programs. Campbell, Antony, Zulawski, and Foley, in “The Effects of Attending High Individual and Collective Teacher Efficacy Schools on Ninth Grade On-Track”, rethink how data on how US ninth grade on-track completion can inform practice with and for administrators and preservice teachers. Specifically, they focus on shifting the mindsets of teachers and teacher educators.

Tracy-Bronson, in “Leaders’ Social and Disability Justice Drive to Cultivate Inclusive Schooling”, provides a lens of school administrators—moving teacher education to be more critical and inclusive, which requires brokers from every level of the ecosystem. This article answers the question, why and how do district-level special education administrators commit to inclusive education, social justice, and disability rights? Wingfield, in “Decentering Whiteness in Early Literacy Through a Culturally Sustaining and Community Informed Lens”, reflects on how the decentering of Whiteness and a focus on culturally sustaining practices and community awareness shifted the experience of literacy coaching in an urban and predominantly Black school community. Wingfield considers how a more inclusive and critical approach to understanding students’ home language, community, and the implementation of a school district’s Amistad curriculum should inform literacy coaches’ approaches to supporting early childhood teachers. Dyce, Hawthorne, and Wire, in “Culture of Interculturality, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (IDEI) Assessment: Lessons from a Social Justice-Based Intercultural Learning Certificate Program for Preservice Teachers”, discussed their theory-based approach to disrupting teacher candidates’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions.

Taken together, these articles collectively embody mutual recognition of all stakeholders in education (e.g., students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members) through culturally relevant policies and practices. This Special Issue shifts teacher education with the acknowledgment and goal to embrace the whole child and how this thinking should inform PreK-20 schooling practices. These articles forefront that all the work in teacher education should hold, acknowledge, and uplift students and their academic achievements at its very foundation.