Editorial: all change?

Your editor has been involved with education for more than half a century and with JET for more than thirty years. During that period education, including teacher education, has borne the brunt of change piled upon change, masquerading under the systematically ambiguous term ‘innovation’. There have been many papers in JET with ‘change’ as a focus for research and just as many with ‘innovation’ in their title. In checking through back issues of the journal what is also striking is just how many different countries’ teacher education systems have been the focus of ‘change’ and ‘innovation’, with JET providing a platform for educational researchers to discuss the effect of inventions and reinventions of educational provision.

This Special Issue’s guest editors, Viv Ellis, Mariana Souto-Manning and Keith Turvey, have identified an international group of researchers so as to commission a set of papers to re-examine the notion of innovation in teacher education. In doing so they move the concept and its practice well away from the dominant economical and technological discourse and place it firmly in the realms of social mobility and justice, these being what they argue for as ‘imperatives for change.’ JET is delighted to be able to host such a critical and well informed approach to innovation in teacher education.

A personal note

It is perhaps fitting that this issue of JET should be about change, as this is the last edition of the journal that I will have the pleasure of seeing through to publication, indeed my last editorial. I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity that editing JET has given me to work with so many international educationists, to improve my own understanding of the variety of research into this field and in some small way help contribute to our shared understanding of the complex nature of teacher education. I have had the great good fortune to work with an excellent and very supportive team overt the past thirty or so years, but I feel it is now time to step down.

I wish to pass on my thanks to our deputy and associate editors as well as to our publishers, Taylor and Francis, and not least to Jenny Francis who took over a somewhat disorderly data base and re-worked it to be the key management tool that it has become.

From January 2019 JET will be in the safe hands of my successor, Professor Linda la Velle. I wish Linda well and I am sure that she will enjoy editing JET and continuing to maintain the international standing and quality of a journal preeminent in its field.