Celebrating the 50th anniversary of APJTE: a reflection on the past, present and future

This year marks the 50 anniversary of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE). We, the editors of the journal, would like to celebrate the milestone year by organising a number of special features in our editorials throughout the year. In addition to introducing the regular articles included in each issue, we are going to invite a number of people who can speak to the promises and challenges for the field of teacher education today, who can help us reflect upon where the field has come from and where it should be headed to in the near future, and who can help us imagine teacher education and research differently through cross-cultural and cross-national dialogues. One thing that we have been trying to achieve in our editorial role over the last few years is to strengthen the linkage between the journal and its sponsoring association, the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA). Last year, we organised two sessions at the ATEA conference; the one where we invited some of the journal’s advisory board members to engage with our eight challenges (see Biesta, Takayama, Kettle, & Heimans, 2020), and the other where an information session about the journal was held to offer ATEA’s early career researchers some tips on how to get published. Besides, one of us regularly attends the ATEA executive meetings to stay informed of their discussions. Though APJTE is not exclusive to ATEA members, it is vitally important that APJTE serves the interests of ATEA and actively advocate for the profession. As part of this ongoing effort to facilitate the linkage, we invited the four keynote speakers at the 2021 ATEA annual conference to be part of our celebration. We asked them to either prepare a manuscript based on their keynote speeches or to be interviewed by us. Jo-Anne Reid (Charles Stuart University, Australia) and Graeme Hall (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) prepared a manuscript, which is included in this issue, while the other three keynote speakers opted to answer our questions in an interview format, and this issue includes an interview with Anne Phelan from the University of British Columbia, Canada. The interviews with Ken Zeichner (University of Washington, USA) and Marnee Shay (University of Queensland, Australia) will be published in the subsequent issues. In Looking back, looking forward: Taking stock of teacher education at (another) crossroad, Jo-Anne Reid and Graeme Hall, the two veteran Australian teacher educators who have been associated with ATEA for many years, offer us a rare glimpse into the history of ATEA and the crucial roles that APJTE has played in helping to enhance the legitimacy of teacher education as a proper discipline within the university and supporting the professionalisation of teachers. In Australia, just as elsewhere, the field of teacher education has been under consistent attack both from within and outside academia. One of the key strategies employed by those who demand proper recognition of teacher education has been to establish the knowledge base of the field upon which teachers can claim their ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 50, NO. 1, 1–7 https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2022.2022854