2021 AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL HISTORY JOURNAL SPECIAL EDITION: Editor's Introduction

With the high number of quality essays, the editorial team had the difficult task of selecting those entries believed to best serve as archival material that will benefit future scholars interested in understanding what it meant to live through the global health catastrophe of COVID-19 while doing the work of educators. In "Leading an Antiracist Experiential Learning Program for Preservice Teachers in the Summer of 2020," authors Aaron Bodle and Emma S. Thacker follow with a fascinating account of their experience fighting to hold an innovative summer camp experience for elementary social studies students. Ga Young Chung closes the first section with a descriptive account of the intended yearlong fiftieth anniversary celebration of an Ethnic Studies Program disrupted by the sharp rise of Xenophobia, the global awareness of Black Lives Matter, and the meaning of the pedagogy for liberation in her contribution, "Teaching Ethnic Studies Remotely Amid Global Pandemic." An advocacy story focuses on a teacher who takes on a powerful school board member in efforts to close schools and quell the spread of the Coronavirus in the fifth essay, "The Desert Flowers Always Bloom Following the Monsoon," authored by Linsay DeMartino and S. Gavin Weiser.