Vol. 23 No. 2 (2022)

It is for me an honor to present our Vol 23 No 2. This issue reflects the hard work of our editorial team and reviewers, who diligently reviewed the submissions we received from authors affiliated with schools, school districts, and higher education institutions in the U.S. and worldwide. I want to thank all of them, especially CIE’s Assistant Editor, Derek Thurber, for his professionalism and high commitment to the editorial process. Thank you to our Managing Editors Matt Romkey  and Blair Stamper, who recently defended her dissertation and graduated from ASU's EdD Educational Leadership and Innovation program. Congratulations, Dr. Stamper! 

Besides serving the education research community, we aim to build a significant learning environment for our student editors and reviewers. Recently we led a workshop on peer-review best practices to ensure that the process is conducted professionally and ethically. We provided the participants with tools to write thorough, caring, and constructive feedback for the authors that hopefully will help them develop their skills as reviewers of other academic outputs. 

The workshop was part of our commitment to open-access to research publications. A couple of months ago, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced that “by 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published” (Brainard & Kaiser, 2022). This policy is a big step towards advancing open access locally and globally, especially within the context of global challenges such as the recent pandemic and climate change. Our workshop was part of the Open Access Week, an international event that CIE celebrated for the third consecutive year. This year, the theme was “Open for Climate Justice.” CIE’s Associate Editor Dilraba Anayatova presented an initiative that ASU is implementing to raise awareness of the need to take collective action to fight climate injustices, the “Turn it Around! Flashcards for Education Futures” project. We hope to receive submissions that address these issues from an educational perspective.

In this issue, our readers will find the paper Comprehensive Literacy Instruction within Classroom Contexts: Teachers’ Perceptions of Best Practices for Literacy. From a sociocultural perspective of learning, the authors explore how teachers combine their experiential knowledge with more theoretical, abstract knowledge to design literacy instruction practices. The authors surveyed reading teachers in K-12 grades. They found that teachers undoubtedly consider students’ needs and local contexts for instruction design, which ultimately challenges top-down policies and predetermined “best practices.”

In Centering Love as the Foundation of a Racially Just and Decolonizing Student Affairs the authors Dian D. Squire, Rachael Blansett, and Raquel Wright-Mair wonder how love as an action–following bell hooks–could play a role in challenging settler-colonial ideologies within the field of Student Affairs. The authors invite the readers to imagine a skill set of love toward transformative changes in the work and praxis of educators. 

As we transition toward ‘post-pandemic’ times, and as many of us struggle(d) with the psychological consequences of the disturbing event, the article authored by Blanca N. Ibarra Understanding SEL to Create a Sense of Belonging: The Role Teachers Play in Addressing Students’ Social and Emotional Well-Being invites us to reflect on the relevance of bringing social-emotional learning to the classroom. Through a literature review, the author analyzes the whys and hows, focusing on the students’ emotional well-being must be a priority for “nurturing the love of learning” in schools.

Ivonne Lujano Vilchis

Editor-in-Chief, on behalf of the CIE Editorial Team

Reference

Brainard, J., & Kaiser, J. (2022, August 26). White House requires immediate public access to all U.S.-funded research papers by 2025. Science Insider. http://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-all-u-s--funded-research-papers-2025