The New Educator

Part 1: Beyond Neoliberal Self-Care: Care, Community, and Collective Well-Being in Teacher Education

Two-Part Companion Issue: Care and Service in Teacher Education: Reimagining the Future of New Educator Preparation 

Our proposed companion special issues for 2027 (issues 2 and 4) examine two interconnected challenges facing teacher education today.  

• Issue 2 explores how new educators, teacher educators, and education researchers navigate self-care, collective care, mentoring, and professional survival amid neoliberal pressures.  

• Issue 4 investigates how service functions as knowledge production, academic citizenship, and field-shaping labor in teacher education.  

Together, these issues ask how care and service might be reimagined not as competing demands, but as mutually reinforcing practices that sustain educators, communities, and the profession itself. 

The priority of these special issues is to foreground lived experiences and richly documented qualitative inquiry that illuminate how educators navigate care, service, community, and institutional life. We particularly welcome qualitative, interpretive, participatory, narrative, ethnographic, autoethnographic, arts-based, and community-engaged studies that center the experiences of educators, teacher educators, community partners, and emerging scholars. 

We seek deeply qualitative and experience-centered scholarship that documents how educators live, negotiate, resist, and reimagine care and service in teacher education.  

While empirical qualitative work is the primary focus of this issue, a limited number of conceptual, theoretical, or speculative manuscripts will be considered when they are closely connected to practice, lived experience, or community-based knowledge production. 

 

Volume 23, Issue #2	Volume 23, Issue #4
Focuses on people	Focuses on institutions
Self-care and collective care	Service and academic citizenship
Burnout, mentoring, refusal	Recognition, reward structures, reform
Lorde, Malone et al., Mitchem et al., Rodriguez, Rosenbaum & Talmor	Beatson, Boveda, Souto-Manning & Martell, Settles et al., Zeichner
"How do educators survive and thrive?"	"How does the field survive and thrive?"
Submissions due: January 10, 2027	Submissions due: April 1, 2027

 

Volume 23, Issue #2 (Part 1)- Beyond Neoliberal Self-Care: Care, Community, and Collective Well-Being in Teacher Education

 

Introduction 

A revival of interest in self-care (Lorde, 1980) and care of the self (Foucault, 1978) before and following the Covid-19 pandemic (Kirton, 2023; Souto-Manning, 2021) has drawn attention to the ways these activities, originally developed as responses to oppression, have been co-opted by neoliberal and late-capitalist projects. Across educational settings, self-care has increasingly been framed through individualized practices that often leave intact the institutional conditions producing exhaustion, precarity, and burnout. 

In teacher education, neoliberal self-care frequently operates through programs and initiatives intended to support educators while simultaneously increasing productivity and compliance. Yet examples from teacher education, Black feminist scholarship, critical disability studies, and anthropology suggest that care can also function as a form of collective resistance and community building. 

Drawing on Rosenbaum and Talmor’s anthropology of self-care, Rodriguez’s concept of radical refuge, Malone et al.’s work on collective healing among Black women scholars, and Mitchem et al.’s examination of doctoral students navigating neoliberal conditions, this special issue seeks empirical, theoretical, and speculative work that examines care as relational, communal, and transformative. 

We are particularly interested in contributions that explore how educators resist neoliberal appropriations of self-care and instead cultivate forms of care that sustain justice-oriented educational work. 

Because questions of care are fundamentally lived and relational, we are especially interested in studies that center personal, collective, and community experiences. Narrative inquiry, critical autoethnography, collaborative autoethnography, testimonio, portraiture, ethnography, critical phenomenology, arts-based inquiry, and other methodologies that illuminate educators' lived realities are particularly welcome. 

 

Possible strands include: 

1. Self-Care and Collective Care among New Educators 
2. Educators of Color, Immigrant, and Transnational Educators 
3. Mentoring, Burnout, and Early Career Development 
4. Care, Refusal, and Alternative Futures for Teacher Education 

 

Sample Questions 

• How are educators conceptualizing and practicing care amid increasing professional demands?
• How are educators from immigrant, transnational, Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized communities experiencing the tensions between self-care, community care, and professional responsibility?
• How are early-career scholars navigating mentorship, burnout, and expectations of productivity?
• What forms of collective care are emerging within and beyond institutions of higher education?
• How might self-care function as a method of resistance, refusal, and transformation in teacher education?

 

References 

Beatson, N.J., Tharapos, M., O’Connell, B.T., de Lange, P., Carr, S., & Copeland, S. (2021). The gradual retreat from academic citizenship. Higher Education Quarterly, 76(4), 715-725. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hequ.12341 

Boveda, M. (15 April 2023). Remarks on Inaugural Reviewer Awards for Division K [Division K Teaching and Teacher Education Program Planning Co-Chair Presentation]. American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois, United States. https://www.aera.net/Events-Meetings/Annual-Meeting/Previous-Annual-Meetings/2023-Annual-Meeting.  

Boveda, M. (2024). What’s a Black feminist doing in a field like special education? Theory into Practice 63(4), 353-365. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2024.2355816 

Foucault, M. (1978/1988). The history of sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self. Vintage.  

Kirton, T. (2023). “I cannot do this anymore”: A teacher educator responds to the Covid-19 and racism pandemics of 2020. Gláuks – Revista de Letras e Artes, 22(2), 59-80. https://www.revistaglauks.ufv.br/Glauks/article/view/184 

Lorde, A. (1980/2020). The Cancer Journals. Penguin.  

Malone, N., Palomino, K.A., Verty, V.P., Goggins, M.K., Jester, J.K., Miller-Roenigk, B., Wheeler, P., Dogan-Dixon, J., Keeling, M., McCleod, K.A., McCray, I., Sigola, Z.A., Atkinson, J.D., Hargons, C.N., & Stevens-Watkins, D. (2024). “You said burnout? Whew, chile!” A multigenerational collaborative autoethnography on the complexities of burnout and care among Black women researching substance use. Women’s Health, 20, 1-16. doi: 10.1177/17455057241299213 

Mitchem, M.C., Buffalo, G.R., Perez, A., Rollins, E.R. (2019). Tales of existing and resisting as female teacher educators in neoliberal times. The New Educator, 16(1), 70-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/1547688X.2019.1681570 

Rodriguez, V. (2024). The radical refuge: Reconceptualizing teacher quality liberated from the historical commodification of Latina and Black women in early childhood education. Occasional Paper Series, (51), 84-98. https://educate.bankstreet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1522&context=occasional-paper-series 

Rosenbaum, S., & Talmor, R. (2022). Self-Care. Feminist Anthropology, 3(2), 362-372. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/fea2.12088 

Rosenbaum, S., & Talmor, R. (2024). Toward an anthropology of self-care. Annual Review of Anthropology, 53, 199-214. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041422-021833 

Settles, I.H., Jones, M.K., Buchanan, N., & Dotson, K. (2021). Epistemic exclusion: Scholar(ly) devaluation that marginalizes faculty of Color. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 14(4), 493-607. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000174 

Souto-Manning, M. (Ed.). (2021). The pandemic as a portal: On transformative ruptures and possible futures for education. Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, 46. https://educate.bankstreet.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1436&context=occasional-paper-series.  

Souto-Manning, M., & Martell, J. (2019). Toward critically transformative possibilities: Considering tensions and undoing inequities in the spatialization of teacher education. Teachers College Record, 121(4), 1-42. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811912100603 

Zeichner, K. (2014, October 21). The struggle for the soul of teaching and teacher education: Imagining a more democratic future for teacher preparation in the U.S. Sachs Lecture Series 2014-2015, Teachers College, Columbia University. New York, NY, U.S. https://youtu.be/uRVXZ0Ctk_0?si=smJ6t9i6bpgf9hGe  

Zeichner, K. (2019). Moving beyond asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented teacher education. Teachers College Record, 121(6), https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811912100610 

Zeichner, K., & Peña-Sandoval, C. (2015). Venture philanthropy and teacher education policy in the U.S.: The role of the New Schools Venture Fund. Teachers College Record, 117(5), 1-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811511700508