Editorial

Inaugural editorial

Since 1963, this journal has been a source of rigorous research on racial justice issues in education. Originally titled Integrated Education, its founding editor-in-chief, Meyer Weinberg, intended it to be “a scholarly journal of record for movements toward educational equality” (quoted in Adams, 2002, p. 3). Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, early issues showcased research on school desegregation in the US, and its implications for schools and society. Since then, the journal’s scope has expanded to incorporate empirical research and theoretical scholarship on educational justice broadly defined, in the US and globally, with an intersectional framework that considers the effects of power structures based on race, gender, class, language, dis/ability, queerness, and other forms of difference. It was renamed twice (to Equity & Excellence in 1986, and Equity & Excellence in Education in 1993), and adopted “an explicit social justice perspective” under the editorship of Maurianne Adams (in 2002). In her inaugural editorial, Adams described this social justice perspective as one that “shares many of the same broad goals” as movements such as “multicultural or anti-racist education, or urban, feminist, or critical education” (p. 4), and “acknowledge[s] the pervasive systems of domination and subordination that lead to inequality and inequity in our classrooms, schools, and universities, and to harmful social interactions between and among teachers and students, or students and peers” (p. 4).

Today, along with empirical research articles, the journal publishes theory-driven cultural critiques, scholarship that transgresses genre conventions, and essays based on critical, humanistic, and action-oriented epistemologies and methodologies. In many ways, the evolution of Equity & Excellence in Education (EEE) since 1963 mirrors the critical turn that has occurred across the social sciences during the same timeframe. Questions about deficiency have been replaced with questions about power. Assumptions of researcher neutrality have been replaced with statements of positionality and stance. Dominant epistemologies and methodologies have been challenged, and new forms of self-reflexive, humanizing, participatory, and community-engaged scholarship have taken root. As the incoming editors, we hope to carry forward this legacy by maintaining EEE as a space for critical, justice-oriented scholarship in education. We are humbled to follow in the footsteps of previous Editors-in-Chief who have upheld the journal and maintained its critical edge: Maurianne Adams (2002-2014), Jason Irizarry (2014–2017), Korina Jocson (2017–2020), and the outgoing team of Jamila Lyiscott, Keisha Green, Justin Coles and Esther Ohito (2020–2023). We also wish to recognize the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), which has generously supported the journal since 1978.

We have updated the journal’s aims and scope to reflect our own unique vision and respond to the particular historical moment in which we find ourselves. We will continue to emphasize the publication of theoretically rich, methodologically rigorous articles and analytical essays that advance or complicate existing conceptualizations and understandings of equity and justice across the field of education. While we recognize the field of education is broad—inclusive of learning in many contexts and across the lifespan—we have made the choice to prioritize manuscripts that engage with or have implications for p-12 schooling in US or global contexts. We especially hope to feature articles that address pressing current issues in US public schooling such as politicized curriculum debates, book bans, school shootings, artificial intelligence, and education for climate justice. We will continue to showcase critical scholarship that engages intersectional examinations of oppression, centers joy and justice, imagines new possibilities, and illuminates pathways toward a safer, more inclusive world.

The success of EEE depends in large part on the goodwill, enthusiasm, and expertise of its editorial team. We are fortunate to have the support of an amazing team: Our Editorial Assistants, Joel A. Arce and Meghan Whitfield, manage daily operations of the journal and support the peer review process from the back end. Both are brilliant scholars in their own right. Our Associate Editors—Kimberly Williams Brown, Jonique Childs, Cindy Cruz, Jacqui Mosselson, Jennifer Lee O’Donnell, Laura Roy, and Enrique Suarez—provide crucial support by shepherding manuscripts through the external reviewer process all the way to publication. They provide a second level of internal review, solicit external reviewers, provide feedback to authors, and make thoughtful recommendations. Our Editorial Board members provide guidance and intellectual vision as well as reviewer service. We truly could not be doing this work without this entire team.

We are fortunate that the outgoing editorial team (Drs. Lyiscott, Green, Coles, and Ohito) left us with rich material to fill our first several issues. In this first issue, we feature articles that were accepted under their editorship, and that represent a range of topics, themes, and methodologies that define the journal. This volume includes both conceptual as well as empirical pieces. Together, the articles in this volume are representative of the topics, genres, and critical perspectives typically found in the journal. Featured topics in this issue include language policy, school district governance, teacher activism, graduate education, academia, Indigenous education, online and remote learning, hip-hop pedagogy, trauma-informed schools, and teacher professional development. Analyses are informed by critical and justice-oriented theories such as Critical Race theory (CRT), Critical Race Feminism, raciolinguistics, Foucault’s power/knowledge, and organizational justice. In keeping with our priorities, the majority of pieces focus on US contexts, while two are centered in Australian and Canadian contexts.

This volume includes three theoretically-grounded conceptual essays about trauma-informed schools, hip-hop based education, and virtual learning. In “Are Deficit Perspectives Thriving in Trauma-Informed Schools? A Historical and Anti-Racist Reflection,” Palma, Abdou, Danforth, and Griffiths challenge educators to thoughtfully fortify trauma-informed schooling by increasing awareness of deficit perspectives and incorporating critical anti-racist, equity-focused practices. In another theoretically-driven analytical article, “For White Folks Who Teach Hip-Hop—and the Rest of Ya’ll, Too: Interrogating the Positionality of Hip-Hop Educators and Researchers,” Adjepong and Allen argue the critical implementation of hip-hop based education must include an interrogation of educator and researcher positionality, and offer a practical framework for white teachers, as well as teachers of all other racial backgrounds, to interrogate their positionality when engaging in hip-hop based education. Finally, in their essay, “Indigenous Zoom: Relational Approaches to Virtual Learning,” Jason Rosenbloom and Michelle Jacob reflect on the rapid shift to emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. They propose embracing Indigenous relational pedagogies to foster humanizing approaches to virtual learning and support student social-emotional needs through digital togetherness.

The volume also includes articles reporting findings from empirical research studies. Adopting an intersectional lens to consider the overlapping nature of social identities, these pieces investigate the experiences of historically marginalized groups such as BIPOC, women, and multilinguals. They study BIPOC faculty in academia; Black, female graduate students; and teacher activists of Color. In “Tenure Undone: Faculty Experiences of Organizational Justice When Tenure Seems or Becomes Unattainable,” Nyunt, O’Meara, Bach, and LaFave employ a three-dimensional framework of organizational justice to analyze interviews with women and BIPOC folks who left faculty positions due to tenure denial. Many participants in their study indicated that they experienced organizational justice violations related to distributive justice (fairness of decisions), procedural justice (fairness of processes), and interactional justice (fairness of interpersonal treatment). In “Self-Silencing as Protection: How the ‘Angry Black Woman’ Stereotype Influences How Black Graduate Women Respond to Gendered-Racial Microaggressions,” Angel Jones describes how Black graduate women respond to gendered-racial microaggressions at a historically white institution. Transgressing academic genre conventions, Jones presents findings via composite counterstory. In “Nurturing ‘A Specific Kind of Unicorn-y Teacher:’ How Teacher Activist Networks Influence the Professional Identity and Practices of Teachers of Color,” Lynette Mawhinney and Kira J. Baker-Doyle report findings from an analysis of interviews with 26 teachers of Color who participate in activist teacher networks. The article’s literature review on critical teacher professional development and teacher-activist networks provides a robust overview of key topics and sources.

Through their analyses, researchers reveal the workings of antiblackness and language prejudice in the discourse(s) of school board meetings, school curricula, and language policy. In “Exposing the White Innocence Playbook of School District Leaders,” authors Melanie Bertrand and Carrie Simpson use a lens of antiblackness to analyze video of school district board meetings. Their findings describe how white supremacy is reinscribed through seemingly colorblind discursive moves, or strategies. Similarly, in “‘Apes,’ ‘monkeys,’ and vibranium: Antiblackness moves in Australian classrooms,” through vivid vignettes Ligia (Licho) López López identifies how antiblack racism moves in the public space, the school classrooms, and the official curriculum in Australia. The author reveals and unpacks antiblackness as a particular form of racism, while imagining alternative futures by developing frameworks such as Afrofuturism. We lead this issue with “False Positives, Re-Entry Programs, and Long Term English Learners: Undoing Dichotomous Frames in US Language Education Policy” by Nelson Flores and Mark Lewis. In this article, authors report findings from a genealogical analysis of normative assumptions in language policy driven by a remediation orientation that frames English learners dichotomously—as those who need support and those who don’t. They call for a reconceptualizing of U.S. language education policy that rejects a remedial orientation to multilingual learners.

As the new Editors-in-Chief of Equity and Excellence in Education, it’s our pleasure to publish our first volume. In this politically polarized and globally precarious historical moment, as we navigate a post-pandemic, post-insurrection education landscape and a right-wing backlash in the form of book bans, anti-CRT, and anti-LBGTQ+ legislation, we hope the articles in this issue will inspire and invigorate justice-oriented educational scholars and practitioners; truly our work matters today as much as it ever has.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).