Editors’ Notes

The editorial team of Action in Teacher Education is excited to introduce the next issue, which contains excellent articles that address timely, relevant issues in educator preparation. All five articles explore ways in which current and future teachers can be better prepared to effectively teach in increasingly diverse settings and in ways which center equity and culturally responsive teaching. The articles authored by Wendy Gardiner, et al., Michael Putnam, et al., and Jennifer Jacobs focus on important issues (e.g., whiteness, self-efficacy, culturally responsive pedagogy, equity-centered pedagogy) that need to be examined in order for educators to effectively meet the needs of all their students, particularly students from historically under-resourced populations. Gardiner, et al., and Jacobs use qualitative research methods – interviews, in Jacobs’s article, and self-study in Gardiner’s article, while Putnam, et al., use a mixed methods design that includes semi-structured interviews and data collected from a culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy scale. The articles authored by Cho, Chou, and Wiens, and Yoon focus on improving the educational outcomes and schooling experiences of bilingual and multilingual education, a growing and critical population in U.S. public schools. While Cho uses quantitative research methods (i.e., the LATS-R or Language Attitude Teachers Survey-Revised), Yoon’s study uses classroom observations and interviews. All five studies’ findings are important for current and future teachers and for educator preparation programs. In “When ‘nice’ isn’t: Confronting niceness and whiteness to center equity in teacher education,” Wendy Gardiner and coauthors, Tierney Hinman, Amy Tondreau, Sophie Degener, Tess Dussling, Elizabeth Stevens, Nance Wilson, and Kristen White, all white female teacher educators, report on findings from a self-study they conducted in conjunction with a cross-institutional community of practice they established to explore and deconstruct the ways in which niceness and whiteness work in complex ways to create new and maintain existing barriers to centering equity and justice in educator preparation programs. For four years, the group met monthly via Zoom to discuss relevant readings by scholars of color and to share and dissect critical incidents that took place in their classes and with their colleagues. A key finding from their study is that this type of identity interrogation and reflection work cannot be done in isolation; collaboration was critical to helping them identify the sometimes subtle ways in which these concepts influence how we navigate difficult conversations and enact our roles as teacher educators. Their article includes detailed information about the readings they selected and the processes they underwent, which should be helpful should readers want to engage in similar work with educator preparation colleagues. In the second article, “Teacher education students’ perceptions about bilingualism and emergent bilingual students,” Cho, Chou, and Wiens used survey data to examine the language philosophies of 235 undergraduate and graduate students from one teacher education program located in a large, urban university in the southwest. Teacher educator student responses were used to answer four research questions and focused on the students’ personal ideas about language. Responses were also used to determine how their ideologies were associated with their backgrounds, their perceptions regarding their teaching responsibilities for and with Emergent Bilingual (EB) learners, as well as their attitudes toward interacting with Emergent Bilingual learners and their families. Results indicated that participants were less monoglossic than heteroglossic in their language beliefs and their ideologies were statistically significantly related to all areas examined. The variable of race was also found to be significantly related to language beliefs. The findings of this study offer important implications for ACTION IN TEACHER EDUCATION 2023, VOL. 45, NO. 2, 87–89 https://doi.org/10.1080/01626620.2023.2191578