The New Educator

Part 2: Field-Shaping Service: Academic Citizenship, Community Knowledge, and the Future of 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, Mitchem, Rodriguez, Rosenbaum & Talmor	Beatson, Boveda, Souto-Manning & Martell, Settles 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 #4 (Part 2) Field-Shaping Service: Academic Citizenship, Community Knowledge, and the Future of Teacher Education 

 

Introduction 

Teacher education faces mounting challenges associated with the decline of academic citizenship, increasing marketization of higher education, and persistent failures to recognize service as legitimate knowledge production. Although service remains essential to mentoring new scholars, supporting professional organizations, conducting peer review, and sustaining school-university partnerships, such labor is often undervalued in traditional reward structures. 

Building on Beatson et al.'s work on academic citizenship, Boveda’s concept of field-shaping service, and scholarship by Zeichner, Souto-Manning, and Martell, this special issue investigates how service contributes to the construction of knowledge within and beyond institutions of higher education. 

We seek scholarship that examines service not as auxiliary labor but as foundational intellectual work that shapes teacher education. Particular attention will be given to work that challenges hierarchies between universities, schools, and communities and that explores possibilities for recognizing community-engaged scholarship, mentorship, partnership development, and professional service as meaningful forms of knowledge production. 

This special issue asks what it would mean to reorganize teacher education so that service is understood as central to the profession's future rather than peripheral to it. 

Because service often occurs in invisible, informal, and under-documented spaces, we seek studies that make this labor visible through qualitative investigation. We welcome research examining mentorship, peer review, community partnerships, coalition building, academic citizenship, and institutionally unrecognized forms of knowledge production. Studies grounded in practitioner experience, collaborative inquiry, and long-term community relationships are particularly encouraged. 

 

Possible strands include: 

1. Academic Citizenship and Field-Shaping Service 
2. Tenure, Promotion, and Recognition of Service 
3. Community Knowledge Production and School-University Partnerships 
4. Limits and Possibilities for Institutional Transformation 

 

Sample Questions 

• How has tenure and promotion guidance shaped knowledge production in teacher education?
• What forms of service most directly shape the field, and how might institutions recognize them?
• How can schools, communities, and universities collaborate to produce knowledge in ways that disrupt traditional hierarchies?
• How are educators and scholars responding to the decline of academic citizenship?
• What limits and possibilities exist for recognizing service as intellectual and scholarly labor?
• How might teacher education institutions be reorganized to better support community-engaged knowledge production?

 

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