Kate Johnson recently published an editorial titled “Editorial: Creating the Elevating Teacher Voice Special Issue” in the Mathematics Teacher Educator journal. Kate has answered a few questions about this article below:
Who were your co-authors on this editorial?
Michael Steele
Who would you say is the target audience for this editorial?
Mathematics Teacher Educators
What is the big problem you hoped to address with this editorial?
We feel that research that includes and elevates teachers' voices (from their own perspectives) are often excluded in mathematics education research. Thus, as editors of the journal Mathematics Teacher Educator, Mike and I worked to explicitly solicit these kinds of manuscripts to publish together in a special issue. In the editorial, we explain the process by which we determined who should write full manuscripts for the journal to share their work that centers and elevates the voices of teachers. We also describe what we learned from the process and what we hope that all mathematics teacher educators and researchers can learn.
What are some of the main ideas you hope your audience will take from this editorial?
We hope that everyone can learn that many people across the field of mathematics teacher education research are doing work that centers and elevates teachers' voices; however, they are not always sharing this work in public venues such as journals and presentations. But we hope that people will begin to engage these discussions with one another. Further, in the editorial, we say, "we must engage in more explicit discussions about how teachers’ voices
(and our own voices) are deformed and (re)formed through the traditional ways we report on research." We hope that people can remember that the norms of research writing require us to select sections of teachers' voices or skew them in ways that make and support the argument the researcher is trying to make. As mathematics (teacher) educators, we should be remembering the humanity and full voices and opinions of the teachers with whom we work and respecting and honoring their voices and perspectives. We also fundamentally hope that reading our editorial will encourage people to read the articles published in the special issue of Mathematics Teacher Educator and the still forthcoming articles that are also a part of the same call for articles.