Mathematics Teacher Educator (MTE) is thrilled to highlight our recently-released special issue, Elevating Teacher Voice. This issue stems from intentions that the editorial team, Mike Steele and Kate Johnson, had from the start of our editorial term. We wanted to think deeply about the role that teachers play in mathematics teacher preparation and professional development, where their voices are represented in the field’s work, and how we might provide more meaningful opportunities to elevate their voices in mathematics teacher education.

In considering this challenge, we noted that there were structural challenges to elevating teacher voice in mathematics teacher education, and in the journal specifically. Reward and incentive structures in PK-12 are not such that engaging in the hard work of authoring or co-authoring an MTE manuscript is always a beneficial use of mathematics teachers’ time. Academic writing is also a genre that is not always welcoming to those outside the university context and the effort to understand the genre and contribute to it can constitute an additional burden on non-university-based mathematics teacher educators. We also recognized the importance of elevating a diversity of teacher voice, not just teachers who were working as colleagues alongside university mathematics teacher educators. In what ways could the voices of preservice teachers and professional development teachers come through to help us paint more robust pictures of teacher learning experiences?

When we created the special call for manuscripts last spring, we took an innovative approach that helped us address this challenge. We met individually with interested groups for 30 minutes to ask them to describe their idea and how it elevated teacher voice. We also created opportunities for principled deviations from the typical MTE manuscript format that would accommodate novel approaches to integrating teacher voice. This resulted in five manuscripts that appear in the February 2024 special issue. Four additional manuscripts, each tagged as Elevating Teacher Voice, will also appear in the June and September 2024 issues to continue the conversation.

We invite you to read the editorial for the February 2024 issue, which describes in much more detail the process of creating the issue, the insights we took away from the work, and the learning in which we invite the field to engage. We encourage you to spend some time with the five articles in the issue, which include many appendices, along with audio and video artifacts that centrally position teacher voice. We invite you to engage with the authors and with us as editors to provide feedback on the issue and we look forward to continuing this important conversation.