Editors’ Notes

Abstract

As we write this note, the annual celebration of Lunar New Year is coming to a close throughout the world’s Asian and Pacific Islander communities. We extend our congratulations for the incoming Year of the Ox while pausing a moment to consider the trauma of the preceding Year of the Rat. In addition to the somber advance of COVID-19–more than half a million deaths in the United States alone, as of this writing– this year has seen a tremendous increase in racially motivated hate crimes among all minoritized groups and notably against the 21 million Americans who are Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islanders. The San Francisco-based community organization Stop AAPI Hate received nearly 4,000 such incidents in the U.S. from March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021 targeting Asians and Asian Americans. The recent brutal killing of six Asian women in Atlanta on March 16, 2021 heightened longstanding anti-AAPI hate crimes, and has galvanized AAPI communities in solidarity against hate and discrimination. As teacher educators, we must recognize that anti-AAPI hate, although recently encouraged by some political leaders to avoid blame for their own failure to address the pandemic, is built into our society through a long history of exclusion, discrimination, and violence, and at times encouraged to thrive within the U.S. educational system (Chang, 1993; Han, 2014; Matsuda, 1991). It is our responsibility as teacher educators to promote high-quality equitable education for ALL teachers and students no matter race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, learning ability, religion, national origin or background; it is also our responsibility to recognize, call out, and take action to correct the injustices besetting the communities in which our teachers, and their students, live, teach, and learn (Ball & Ladson-Billings, 2020; Zeichner, 2020). With the backdrop of continued societal challenges and opportunities, we present eight articles in Issue 43(2), that explore important teacher education topics ranging from teacher educators’ self-efficacy in addressing LGBTQ issues, teacher educators’ effort to implement a funds of knowledge approach, teacher residency programs’ claims of legitimacy and approaches to define success, and the impact of teacher education programs on prospective teachers as well as their students. Methodologically, these articles provide examples of mixed-methods and qualitative case studies that have the potential to advance research and practice in teacher education. Our first article, “Grappling with Funds of Knowledge in Rural Appalachia and Beyond: Shifting Contexts of Pre-Service Teachers,” authored by Melissa Sherfinski, Sharon Hayes, Jing Zhang and Mariam Jalalifard, presents a case study of teacher educators’ effort to implement a Funds of Knowledge approach in a rural Appalachian teacher education program. The authors adopt Bakhtin’s theory of polyvocality to examine how White pre-service teachers (PSTs) in rural Appalachia attempted to “grapple” with funds of knowledge during student teaching and in diversified settings after graduation. Results indicate that many PSTs could not engage with funds of knowledge because they had a simplified and incomplete understanding of funds of knowledge and saw the rural Appalachian children and families they worked with through a deficit lens. In further follow-ups with the PSTs after they entered teaching, the researchers found that former PSTs remaining in rural and Appalachian contexts showed emergent knowledge of funds of knowledge. However, those who moved to urban or suburban contexts with many students of color focused on order, discipline, and the control of bodies in without grappling with important issues related to funds of knowledge. On the basis of the findings, the authors provided important practice and policy considerations to support PSTs to understand the complexities of rural places and, more importantly, to transfer knowledge of funds of knowledge from their student teaching to new settings in their future teaching.