Note from the Feminist Teacher Editorial Collective

Dear readers of Feminist Teacher:

It is time for a new group of feminists to take up this project of soliciting, developing, and editing new content under the title Feminist Teacher. We have been publishing since 1985. Over decades we have discovered and maintained our commitment to feminist publishing itself as a pedagogical act, helping to make and transform knowledge of feminist pedagogy and the transformational uses of feminist scholarship in education, from K–12 to community education to higher education. Anyone interested in being part of this next group should contact Gail_Cohee@brown.edu. In our next phase as the current editors, we hope to package groups of articles originally published in Feminist Teacher into custom readers.

The world of academic writing and publishing has changed immensely since we began our work in 1985.

When we began this work, there were no search engines revealing unreadable quantities of material about the history and practices of feminist teaching. Early members of the Feminist Teacher collective couldn’t find anything except a stray article or two (Sandy Runzo) about feminist teaching. So a group of graduate students and allies at Indiana University–Bloomington founded a magazine that was always questioning its relationship to academia and the foundationally conservative system of K–12 education in the United States. That early publication was magazine-size and contained articles of about ten to twelve pages that focused on the conditions and practices of feminist teaching, as well as providing teaching resources. It existed in hard copy only.

We started FT before there were GoFundMe campaigns, though we persuaded people to prepay subscriptions and donate to us. One member of the founding collective used the Bloomington Herald-Telephone newspaper’s facilities to do early production on the magazine. We advertised in off our backs and NWSA Journal. At that time, we envisioned our publication as written by its readers— other feminist teachers. We asked our friends and colleagues to write for us; we wanted them to see themselves as revolutionary practitioners, as documenting practices that could develop a visible history. We did not read blind submissions. Nor did we embrace the official “peer-reviewed” label. Part of our work was identifying feminist teachers who could become writers, documenters, and reflectors on practice—its history and theory.

In “Collectively Speaking,” the introduction to The Feminist Teacher Anthology (Teachers’ College Press, 1998), we wrote, “Beginning with the first issue in 1985, we at Feminist Teacher strove to make connections between theory and practice in the classroom and to provide a forum for teachers committed to fighting sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and other forms of social injustice.” Since then our interests have developed to include issues of all kinds in feminist education—articles on teaching women’s studies while identifying as male, teaching gender studies as trans professors, working with trans youth, working with graduate students, and articles on the racism faced by feminist teachers of color. We have published articles around physicality, transnational feminisms, and about teaching outside the traditional classroom setting, to name just a few topics our authors have tackled.

Now our writers find us on the internet, in their libraries, and at NWSA, and their articles are rich, challenging, skillful pieces of work that deserve to be published as part of a larger text of feminist pedagogy. Now we no longer list teaching resources because you can find those resources online faster than we can produce an issue. Now you can buy a digital subscription to the journal. Now we sense that readers read in a different way: cherry-picking articles from JSTOR without a sense of the issue the article came from. Now we wonder if anyone besides us reads an issue in its entirety and thinks about it as an issue, as an intentional collection and sequence of full-length articles that have been peer-reviewed.

In our twenty-fifth anniversary issue, former collective member Sandra Runzo wrote, “it seems to me the magazine has been an important vehicle or venue for sharing ideas and experiences and addressing issues related to feminist teaching or teaching in all kinds of ways” (208). But...