Editorial Statement

By definition, The Educational Forum’s non-themed issues typically cover a wide and random range of concerns across the educational landscape. The diversity of those concerns often presents a challenge to creating an introduction because the collection of articles is almost centrifugal, resisting essentializing commonality. However, taken together as a collection, the research reports and essays assembled for this issue reflect the simultaneous complexity and variety that educators, students, parents, administrators, and community stakeholders face on a continual basis in contemporary education.

The questions and challenges researched in this issue's manuscripts seldom appear in isolation as they do in each discrete article, but rather as an interwoven, overlapping, dynamic collage that often forces educators to provide triage without critical reflection. Accordingly, educational research often attempts to present two (or more) competing dimensions. The intentional and systematic demands of research require a kind of tight focus on a specific domain or problem, which is then counterbalanced by the need to situate each issue in a larger contextualized geography. Additionally, although each individual research report or essay connects the authors’ central question to a larger framework, the four research reports and four essays chosen for this issue achieve a kind of synergistic illustration of contemporary educational concerns by virtue of being collected together here.

This issue begins on a dramatic highpoint with consideration of the increasing frequency of school-based shootings in recent years. As of this writing, in the 39th week of the year, the website of the organization “Everytown for Gun Safety” (https://everytownresearch.org/school-shootings/) lists 33 school-based shooting incidents to date. During 10 of those 39 weeks, schools were not in session, so targeted shootings have averaged more than one per U.S. school or university per week. This exploration raises questions beyond those of gun use, gun control, and school safety to include issues of psychological safety within an increasingly volatile society. In 1967, humorist Jules Feiffer wrote Little Murders, a satirical play about a society where public shootings become an integral part of life. Few of us ever expected his ironic work would be a foretelling.

What this article shares with the other seven in this issue is a multifaceted look at how intersecting identities can influence educational experience and teaching practice. Each article is connected to the others by a focus that echoes words from Parker Palmer (1999): “We teach who we are” (p. 10). This issue brings together a series of studies that look at such deeply embedded dynamics as

• the development of a literary identity,

• the emergence of divergent thinking through the intersection of math and play,

• the retention of early-career teachers in International Schools in Asia,

• the bidirectional tensions of being and educating a student who is labeled as both gifted and disabled,

• the emergence of preservice teachers’ ability to negotiate difficult behaviors and challenging collaborations,

• the cultivation of affective dispositional domains such as virtue and ethos, and

• the connections between intersectionality and several major social identity elements.

As a unified but non-themed collection, the articles presented here make a strong statement about how to problematize, analyze, and connect particular educational phenomena. In short, none of the subjects of these articles exists in isolation; each affects several others. Further, how we interact with these shared topics offers us an image of our own individual values.

In a sense, this collection provides an incipient introduction to our special issue on educational activism (82:3) to be published in July this year. In that issue, we hope to explore ways in which educators across the K–16 (and beyond) spectrum have managed to forge a connection between education as a transformative experience and activism that makes a difference, both in and outside of the classroom. We hope you find this issue's collection as provocative and generative as we do.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alan Amtzis

Dr. Alan Amtzis is Director of the Master of Education Program in Educational Leadership: Instruction for The College of New Jersey. A former English teacher, special education teacher, and school principal of a therapeutic school for adolescents in recovery for drug and alcohol problems, he received his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College in 2003. Dr. Amtzis served for four years as Chair of the Teacher-as-Researcher Special Interest Group for the American Educational Research Association and currently serves as their Historian and Immediate Past Chair. His research and professional interests include teacher research and practitioner inquiry, creativity development, arts-based education, narrative and other forms of qualitative research methodology and assessment, and new and emerging issues about teaching, learning, and knowledge. He has presented his work on teacher education, therapeutic education, research methodology, reflective practice, and creativity development at more than 40 regional, national, and international professional research conferences.