Journal of Diversity and Equity in Educational Development

JDEED EDITORIAL TEAM

JDEED EDITORIAL BOARD

Letter From the Editors

Dear Colleagues,

We released the inaugural issue of the Journal of Diversity and Equity in Educational Development (JDEED) earlier this year, in a period of heightened uncertainty surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices in higher education. We are releasing this, our second issue, at a moment when many restrictions that were once fiercely contested have become increasingly accepted and normalized. Over the past few months, we have witnessed the abrupt closure of centers for teaching and learning (CTLs), funding cuts across higher education, curtailed CTL programming, and heightened scrutiny of educational developers and their work. Across our field, colleagues are facing mounting pressure to depoliticize their work and soften, obscure, or altogether abandon the language of DEI and antiracism to maintain institutional alignment or professional security. What felt “unprecedented” in January 2025 has, in many contexts, become part of the accepted landscape of higher education and educational development. However, this normalization has also offered a revelation: these shifts expose tensions around how educational development is understood, supported, and valued within higher education.

The current moment has placed educational developers in a position of continual self-justification, requiring us to defend our relevance and frame our work in increasingly narrow and politically neutral terms. Many institutions have pressured educational developers to move away from DEI terminology and adopt a more palatable “evidence-based” phrasing. While such language might be useful for highlighting the intellectual basis of pedagogy, it can also reinforce limited understandings of what counts as evidence, whose ways of knowing are recognized as legitimate, and which learning approaches matter within higher education. What often goes unnamed in conversations about the future of educational development is the centrality of antiracist and equity-oriented work in the field. At their best, educational developers support faculty in cultivating equitable learning environments, interrogating assumptions embedded within curriculum and assessment, and examining how power operates within classrooms and institutions of higher education. Teaching has never been a neutral act (Freire, 2000), and meaningful educational development cannot be disentangled from questions of equity, justice, and antiracism.

JDEED is committed to cultivating and sustaining a scholarly space expansive enough to hold critical reflection, lived experience, storytelling, creative inquiry, and liberatory pedagogies alongside empirical research. The urgency of our mission is reinforced by the current political landscape. We invite educational development scholar-practitioners to critically interrogate the structures in which we work, to examine our own roles in reproducing or interrupting oppressive systems, and to grapple with the implications of the belief that pedagogy can never be neutral. We are interested in how educational development may contribute to more equitable, just, and imaginative possibilities in higher education.

Collectively, the manuscripts in this issue position educational development as a scholarly, relational, liberatory, and deeply human work. They remind us that educational development is fundamentally about partnering with students, faculty, and other institutional stakeholders to cultivate the conditions that make transformative learning possible.

Several contributions in this issue explore how faculty learning can serve as a catalyst for educational transformation. In “Becoming a More Inclusive Instructor,” Tracie Addy and colleagues describe how a semester-long community read became a shared site of reflection and meaning-making and in which faculty engaged with students’ perspectives. Similarly, in “Exploring the Impacts of Course Reinvention: A Collective Autoethnography,” Mayuko Nakamura and colleagues offer an autoethnographic longitudinal study in which faculty recount their pedagogical transformations following a DEI-focused course redesign institute.

These pieces are complemented by contributions that foreground the collective and institutional dimensions of equity work. In “We Are Still Here,” Jaime O’ Connor offers a steadying call for community and collective persistence, reminding us that it is our shared commitment to antiracism that allows the work to endure. Ashely Stender and Madeleine Gonin extend this focus to institutional practice in “Inclusive STEM Education through Student-Faculty-Staff Learning Communities.” The authors invite us to the practice of employing course equity data to foster equitable student outcomes in large STEM courses. Finally, three center directors close the issue in the Conversations piece with their reflection on leadership in unsettled times, each articulating what it means to hold fast to an equity-oriented north star amid an increasingly hostile political climate.

We hope that this issue offers insight into how the field might articulate its purpose and value within this shifting landscape. We also hope it serves as a reminder that you are not alone in this work—that you have a community of peers committed to sustaining equitable and justice-oriented teaching and learning. Above all, we hope this issue affirms the validity and necessity of your practice, recognizes the labor it entails and the care with which you do it, and reinforces the belief that equity- and justice-oriented educational development matters, even amid constraints, resistance, and institutional pressure.

With appreciation,

The JDEED Editorial Team

June 2026