As Despina Potari indicated in her final editorial in Issue 1 of Volume 27, I am honored and deeply humbled to assume the role of Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education (JMTE). Under her leadership, JMTE has continued its long tradition of publishing high-quality scholarship that continues to broaden our understanding of the development of mathematics teaching and teacher learning. Thank you, Despina, for your wisdom and ongoing commitment to the JMTE community over the past several years. I also want to take this opportunity to personally thank Despina for inviting me to join the JMTE editorial team six years ago and for serving as a mentor as I learned the ins and outs of editorial work. Building on the efforts of past editorial teams, she has strengthened the foundation on which the current editorial team can not only elevate scholarly work focused on issues central to the JMTE mission, but also push and redefine the boundaries of mathematics teacher education research in ways that reflect our ever-changing society that bring with it the emergence of new and diverse paradigms and frameworks.

We also welcome a new associate editor, Thorsten Scheiner from Australian Catholic University in Australia. He joins the rest of the JMTE editorial team, including Salvador Llinares (University of Alicante, Spain), Karin Brodie (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) and Takeshi Miyakawa (Waseda University, Japan). Together, our editorial team represents 5 continents spanning both the global north and global south, a truly international team.

In my first editorial as editor-in-chief, I would like to lay out two broad goals for my tenure at JMTE. First, we want to maintain the “theoretical eclecticism” that Thomas Cooney described in his inaugural editorial when this journal was initially launched 26 years ago. “An appreciation for diversity of ideas, of approaches, and of context can only contribute to our understanding of teacher education and to our own professional development. It is my fervent hope that JMTE contributes to this dialogue of understanding” (Cooney, 1998, p. 1). The papers included in this issue of JMTE well illustrate this sort of eclecticism in terms of their foci, methodological approaches, and theoretical frameworks. In my role, I hope to continue this tradition of promoting such theoretical eclecticism and elevating diverse perspectives as the contexts in which teachers work and learn become increasingly complex and the frameworks and analytic approaches needed to study and understand these contexts necessarily emerge and evolve.

Second, we want to continue to improve the overall experience for both authors and reviewers at JMTE. This includes making the manuscript submission and review processes smooth, efficient, and transparent. For example, we want to enhance the reviewer experience at JMTE. As an editorial team, we learn a lot from reviewers because editors do not know everything, and we each have our own theoretical and empirical blind spots simply by virtue of the unique lenses and experiences through which we view the world. Over the next several months, we will be sharing a revised set of reviewing criteria that we hope will provide guidance for reviewers to promote a supportive and balanced review process while also ensuring that the ideas are well-grounded in evidence and relevant research and situated for an international audience. We also want to continue to increase submissions from authors who represent global regions that are currently underrepresented in past issues of JMTE. In an upcoming issue, my colleagues at JMTE will present a summary of and recommendations from their efforts to understand from the JMTE community how we can better support authors from underrepresented regions in viewing the journal as an outlet for their work. I recognize that there is much work to be done in regard to improving the submission and review processes, and I wholly embrace the challenge.

Related to this second goal, I want to reiterate one of the issues I raised for prospective authors in my last editorial regarding the international scope of JMTE. JMTE is an international journal. As such, the papers published in JMTE need to describe scholarly work that has importance and implications for our understanding of related ideas in regions beyond authors’ home countries. For prospective authors, this means the phenomenon under study needs to be situated for an international audience. Do the ideas described in the manuscript have relevance for related issues and contexts in other countries or regions? If so, in what ways? If not, how can an argument be made for such relevance? How can the international readership of JMTE see this work as relevant to their settings and contexts? As Barbara Jaworski (2002) stated in her first editorial, “it seems important not to be restricted just to national contexts but to relate our national settings to knowledge and theory internationally. We should like to see JMTE fostering international awareness, and thus overtly encourage authors from all countries to see JMTE as an outlet for their work” (pp. 4–5). From my perspective, this sentiment applies not only to authors, but also reviewers, editorial board members, and editorial team members—without such globally diverse perspectives represented in these different JMTE spaces, we narrow the perspectives and ideas from which we are able to learn from as we read the papers published in JMTE.

I am hopeful that as we work toward these two broad goals that JMTE will continue to be a space of learning for all who are involved in its processes. And I look forward to working with the JMTE community as we continue to maintain the scholarly traditions laid out by previous editorial teams and work to elevate scholarly work that pushes the ever-evolving boundaries of mathematics teacher education in innovative and diverse ways, and mathematics education more broadly.