Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Diversity and Equity in Educational Development (JDEED)! We are proud and thrilled to share this issue with you.

When we launched JDEED a few days before the 2024 US presidential election, we were excited and nervous. There had already been increasing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education, but we did not anticipate the disorienting storm of executive orders and anti-DEI proclamations that the administration would issue within days of the inauguration. Nor did we anticipate the complicity with these anti-DEI policies, rhetoric, and scare tactics that many of us have since witnessed within higher education broadly, and at many of our institutions and centers, specifically. We have seen officials in our institutions preemptively scrub websites mentioning DEI, demolish whole programs aimed to serve historically underserved students, and remove services and supports, essentially ensuring that students and faculty from groups that have been historically underrepresented, undercounted, and underserved in higher education remain so. Those who, just five years ago, following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other unarmed Black people, declared themselves allies, accomplices, and social justice warriors, were now, it seems, engaging in practices of complicity, fear, and appeasement, while calling these actions “strategic.” Unfortunately, many of our colleagues, as historian Timothy Snyder might say, have “[obeyed] in advance.”

Therefore, as we celebrate the first year and first issue of JDEED, we are also reminded that DEI is being systematically dismantled across our country and within our institutions. We are reminded that threats to DEI are threats to thoughtful and effective teaching and learning. We are also, quite selfishly, reminded that threats to DEI are a threat to this journal. To that end, we have had to continually reflect on our purpose and viability in this political moment.

The work of creating JDEED began in the spring of 2024, when the current members of the editorial team came together over our shared values of equity, representation, and inclusion in our profession. Having observed the dearth of publications by minoritized educational developers in leading journals, as well as the lack of research in the field centering minoritized groups, we wanted to explore pathways to publication for minoritized educational developers and those committed to writing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in educational development.

We had observed that minoritized people in the field, including women of color, people with disabilities, and trans* individuals, are pioneering educational development practices. Nevertheless, they are often overlooked when centers are seeking experts, consultants, and keynote speakers—largely because they are underrepresented in publishing. In other words, the currency of educational development, like much of academia, is scholarship. This journal stemmed from the idea that inequitable publications and citations lead to a disadvantage in recognition and career opportunities for minoritized educational developers. In addition, we wanted to see the centrality of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in stories, practices, and experiences of minoritized communities reflected in academic publications. We believed and still believe that these topics deserve to be more than special issues, and should instead be integral to the work of teaching and learning.

In founding this journal, we aimed to pair scholarly engagement with scholarly publishing. On the scholarly engagement side, we facilitate opportunities that create community and demystify academic publishing. For example, in our Meet the Scholar series, notable figures in the field such as Isis Artze-Vega, James Lang, Tolu Noah, and Michele DiPietro, graciously give their time to discuss their writing practice. In addition, we hold biweekly Writing Circles or unstructured writing times to foster community as we do the mental and sometimes emotional and identity work of writing. And, we launched the inaugural JDEED-The OpEd Project Commentaries Fellowship initiative as a roadmap to public scholarship. On the publishing side, we offer a variety of article types, including Commentaries and Reflections on Practice, to provide writers a variety of access points to scholarly writing. We believe that this combination of offerings will diversify both the field and the types of manuscripts published.

In one of our early Editorial Board meetings, a board member helpfully noted that foes of DEI are the ones telling the story of DEI, and therefore misrepresenting and distorting the definitions, purposes, and beneficiaries of DEI-related practices. Over this year, we have reaffirmed our belief that JDEED exists, in part, to tell the story of DEI in this historical and political moment. It is a story that centers the knowledge, practices, and lived experience of minoritized communities in higher education. It is a story that honors the labor and knowledge of minoritized writers and educational developers.

To tell the story of DEI in this moment, we have had to adapt in ways that we didn’t anticipate a year ago. For example, when we founded the journal, we planned to focus on DEIB concerns in a North American context. We had decided that because identities, particularly issues of race, are context-specific, and given our expertise as an editorial team, we would limit our focus. However, a board member expressed concern about replicating exclusions in the field, particularly the exclusion of the Global South, and noted the ways in which we can learn about DEI across geographic contexts. We have therefore expanded our focus and our forthcoming call for articles describes that new focus. As another example, we did not anticipate a reality in which publishing in a journal with “diversity” and “equity” in its name could pose a threat to writers’ livelihoods or safety. Understanding that the standard in academic publishing is transparency of authorship but also recognizing that some of our authors have faced credible threats, we have now begun to develop an anonymization policy that will, on a case-by-case basis, allow authors to publish anonymously while also maintaining the journal’s alignment with best scholarly practices.

We are continuing to adapt in order to meet this moment, and we thank our partners for their insights, time, and grace in our first year. A core belief among the editorial team is that writing happens best when it is in community, and it has taken an incredible, community-wide partnership and effort to launch this issue and journal. Therefore, thank you:

With deep gratitude for this community, we are proud to introduce the first issue. Some pieces in this inaugural issue reflect on the field of educational development itself while others push its boundaries in exciting directions. In “A Return to Interrogating Educational Development,” Marisella Rodriguez, Heather Dwyer, and Jamiella Brooks employ journey mapping to critically interrogate educational development and foster reflection on how we might be recreating inequities in the field. Sophie LeBlanc, in “How Much Space Are We Willing to Sacrifice to Gen AI?”, explores how discourses about AI often sideline conversations about equity and bias. Meanwhile, in “Revealing the Hidden Curriculum of Educational Development: Academic Writing Collaboratives as Counterspaces,” Lindsay Onufer and colleagues, some of whom participated in the POD Academic Writing Scholars program pilot and later formed an academic writing collaborative, describe how the “hidden curriculum” of scholarly publishing in educational development has shaped both their experiences in the field and their self-conceptions. In their Reflection on Practice, “Creating Climates Resistant to Sexual Harassment: Reflections for Prosocial, Equity-Focused Educational Development Trainings,” Christine Simonian Bean and Hayley Heaton describe their efforts leading a sexual harassment training for administrators at an R-1 institution. Though this is not work we typically associate with educational development, it demonstrates the potential role of educational developers in facilitating organizational and social change. Similarly, Britt Threatt and Stacey Lawrence expand the contours of educational development in their Commentary, “Ensemble Class: Troubling the Monster Narratives about Faculty of Color in the Classroom,” by drawing on the field of narrative theory to offer the “Ensemble Class” a framework designed to reduce bias in student evaluations of teaching.

The pieces in this issue also explore how DEI in pedagogy is informed by national policy, faculty-student relationships, and individual beliefs. In our inaugural Conversations piece, an interview-style article featuring participants with diverse perspectives, three educational developers of color working in states long hostile to DEI share their experiences before and after the national backlash. In her Commentary, “In Assessment, It’s Not Rigor or Equity, It’s Both,” Lina Eskew reframes discourses on rigor and equity by centering both the student-teacher relationship and a relationship-rich model of assessment. In their research article, “Faculty Development for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in STEM: Mentoring Relationships of Minoritized Students and Faculty in an LSAMP Program,” Jennifer R. Ackerman and colleagues identify lessons educational developers can draw from the mentor-mentee relationships formed by historically underrepresented faculty and students in a STEM research program. Finally, Jillian Ives, in “‘You Should Think About Teaching. You’re Really Good at it’: The Starting Points of Instructors’ Confidence in Equity-Based Teaching,” examines the early stages of the faculty teaching journey to explore how 10 US college instructors formed beliefs about their efficacy in teaching minoritized college students at PWIs. Taken together, these articles illustrate the ways in which DEI is enacted and experienced in educational development.

Finally, in crafting this issue, we have often been reminded of Toni Morrison’s reflections from her 1975 public speech at Portland State University:

We believe that this sentiment may also be extended to other -isms and -phobias, such as sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, etc. To that end, we invite you to join us, as a writer, reviewer, event attendee, or reader, to do your work. Join us in giving yourself permission to focus unapologetically on your creative and intellectual interests. Join us in resisting the very real politics of distraction, erasure, and violence that persist today. Together we can write into being new ideas, new possibilities, and new knowledge—work that only you, with your unique talents, identities, and experiences are positioned to create.

With appreciation,

The JDEED Editorial Team

November 2025