Editorial Statement

It has been a year since we began a socially distanced existence during the Covid pandemic. We are reminded that teachers have been teaching remotely for an entire year now, navigating new terrains, trying to find new and innovative tools to engage students, and holding loving and compassionate spaces for the emotional roller coaster that so many students, teachers, and families are experiencing. We have certainly been on what The Grateful Dead would call “a long strange trip” and we are tired, burned out, and at times hopeless. As Julia Ries’ title in a recent article in the Huff Post states, It’s not just you. A lot of us are hitting a pandemic wall right now (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coronavirus-pandemic-wall-mental-health_l_ 601b3c9dc5b6c0af54d09ccb?utm_campaign=share_facebook&ncid=engmodushpmg00000003&fbclid=IwAR2FDa5JinH0aPYuCRNztELZ1I8NNLs_62RhuJZn6kJmsJvAaW3Uy_aVZzQ). Acknowledging the wall we are pushing up against, we asked ourselves what do we do in our personal and professional lives when we feel stagnant, spent, or done? How do we reenergize and renew ourselves? Where do we usually look for inspiration? What do we do to shake things up when many of our ideas for doing so are unsafe or non-existent? We are reminded that when we feel at a loss, our most powerful tools involve finding ways to see whatever is in front of us differently. That might mean taking a new walking route, listening to a different podcast or radio station, trying a new physical activity or hobby, or reading new research. In fact, Monica remembers that when she was writing her dissertation and would get stuck during her data analysis process, her advisor would tell her to go back to the literature to jumpstart a new way of thinking. In this issue, we ask readers to do the exact same thing. We offer a collection of articles that ask you to think differently about familiar topics, so that you consider new ways of thinking about them. At a time when our ability to change our perspective is limited, when we must sit within the same four walls day after day, we offer another way–of delving into the experiences of another and of changing and trying on a new lens in order to see teaching practices or assessments with fresh eyes. The pieces in this issue help us to make the familiar distant, to create space in our minds, for another way of being and doing. We begin the issue with pieces by several of our international authors. These global perspectives help us to reexamine, rethink, and renovate the ways in which we think about teaching. The first article by Bara and Fuentes invite us to critical examine the taken for granted conceptions of contemporary educational practice, of those who teach and those who learn and how they work together, using a communitarian lens. They contend that the stage where teaching and learning occurs has become overly focused on the technical tools of teaching— resources, techniques, strategies, and ways of thinking, which seem to distract from the process of teaching and learning. How instead can we quiet the noise and focus on helping students to discover their best selves? Next Vaďurová and Slepičková descriptively share the use of Global Storylines (GSL) in Czech primary schools. The GSL approach is an innovative model