Welcome to this issue of PDS Partners: Bridging Research to Practice (PDSP), the first to feature an entire set of articles accepted by the new editorial team. Fittingly, it opens with an important message from a former editor. In her new role as our organization’s president, Garin shares some exciting changes on the horizon. Further commemorating the occasion, the next piece is the inaugural contribution to our new “Thank You for Your Service” column, in which López-Robertson highlights an elementary school principal’s decades-long “commitment to her community, schools, teachers, and families,” evident in “an atmosphere where all ideas are welcome, and where all people feel a sense of belonging.” López-Robertson’s emphasis on Ms Satterwhite’s capacity for building community and engaging others in that active process ably illustrates key principles of professional development school (PDS) models, as explained in Volume 18, Issue 2 of PDSP, which centered on the Nine Essentials. Because one of those principles is “recognition of accomplishments” with an eye toward “long-term sustainability” (Cosenza et al., 2023, p. 87), we encourage you to consider writing about one or more members of your own school–university partnership for a future installment of “Thank You for Your Service.” As our organization adopts a more inclusive scope, encompassing school–university partnership models beyond the PDS framework, we hope the column can highlight a similarly expansive view of service and those who serve.
Indeed, recent shifts in teacher education have included a preference for teacher candidate terminology rather than the arguable misnomer of preservice, thus recognizing aspiring educators as learners and laborers (Basile, 2023), much like their supervisory counterparts. Related calls for “PK–12 mentor teachers to serve as boundary-spanning, school-based teacher educators” (Parker, Zenkov, & Glaser, 2021, p. 66) have likewise steered scholars’ attention to their crucial, multifaceted roles. PDS and other school–university partnerships should be primed to acknowledge the panoply of contributions from diverse community members that make such educational spaces unique, yet a study of PDS scholarship suggests room for representational growth. Examining a sample of 300 articles, Breault (2014) argued that although P–12 educators appear to be “the dominant partners in PDS research… no voice really comes through the literature unmediated by a university perspective” (p. 23). Further, despite the ostensible impact of various initiatives on student learning, children’s perspectives are seldom salient in the field at large (Hartman et al., 2021).
Therefore, like Breault (2014), we see the need to “deliberately and fairly represent the voices of all PDS partners” (p. 33). With PDSP serving as an ideal venue for achieving that aim, we are delighted to share the articles in this issue. The very authorship of DiCicco et al.’s piece exemplifies the boundary-spanning nature of PDS work, linking school and university leaders in the act of reflecting on their young and promising partnership. They readily assert, “We are working every day to make the partnership better,” adding, “Working together makes sense because we all have the same goal: to provide the best education to students, both in middle school and at the university.”
Strawhecker et al.’s contribution to the issue also exhibits the PDS commitment to “collaborative work, reflection and research.” Significantly, the authors conducted a study in which parents served as participants, offering vital insights on the teacher educators’ efforts to promote STEM education in an early childhood setting. According to Strawhecker et al., parental participation illuminated “the value of educational opportunities provided through home environments” for university students, in addition to encouraging community-oriented dissemination of their findings.
In another example of spanning boundaries, Cramer and Tichenor, through an independent study conducted with teacher candidates, consider a reexamination of garden-based learning from “just a club” or “reward-based thing” to an opportunity for all students to engage in cross-disciplinary learning. As school gardens and the desire to teach students good health and environmentally sustainable practices have surged, according to Cramer and Tichenor, so too has the need for teacher preparation programs to “explicitly include sustainability principles throughout their curriculum” in order to institutionalize garden-based learning and not rely on “a single champion teacher to keep the project going.”
In sum, this issue of PDSP reflects the awe-inspiring breadth of activity involved in creating and sustaining school–university partnerships. It brings to mind Starr’s (2020) proposal that becoming a classroom teacher should be “the first step on [one’s] education journey,” the precursor to myriad “opportunities to learn and grow” (p. 60). As the authors in this issue illustrate, PDS and other models can support such lifelong learning. In that spirit, as 2023 draws to a close, we find ourselves reflecting on our first year at the helm of PDSP, a decidedly informative leg in our own professional journeys. Mindful that being and becoming are ongoing processes, much like the constant flow of submissions in our journal’s publication pipeline, we look forward to new learning opportunities in 2024. Echoing Helfrich and Hartman’s (2023) call for teacher educators to “ensure school-based partners’ voices are heard and valued” (p. xvii), we invite you – and all of your community members – to join us.
