President's Note
We welcome you to the September 2025 edition of the VACTE Newsletter - a still new effort to communicate with our members. I write as your new President, a position in which I’ll serve until June 2027 (FYI, VACTE presidents serve the equivalent of six-year terms - two as President-Elect, two as President, and two as Past-President). I count myself as a “servant-leader”: I view leadership as a chance to engage more deeply with my colleagues and to facilitate conversations and promote structures that will bring more of us to table in the service of teacher education. Laurie Rice from Liberty University is our new President-Elect.
A few updates from VACTE’s temporary “home office” (my home) in Alexandria…
Inquiry Initiative
As a follow-up to the three-year implementation of ATE’s Inquiry Initiative, VACTE will launch a two-year edition in Virginia at our Fall 2025 Conference. The purpose of the initiative is to:
- Provide a focused, collaborative research structure for VACTE members to address a pressing scholarly, pedagogical practice, and policy issue: teacher retention
- Promote long-term research relationships among existing VACTE members - and provide new members with opportunities to engage
- Highlight VACTE as a research, practice, and policy player in the Commonwealth
We are excited to welcome 29 individuals from across the Commonwealth to engage in this two-year endeavor!
Proposed Constitutional Revisions
Please be on the lookout for some proposed revisions to the VACTE constitution. Laurie Rice (our President-Elect) and I are working to tweak the language of the constitution to enhance representation of all VACTE members and institutions on our board and committees and in all of our activities.
Leadership Job Descriptions
Also in the interests of being transparent with our membership and in the hopes of encouraging other members to consider leadership roles, we are currently drafting job descriptions for each of our leadership roles. We will share as soon as they are complete!
Potential Joint Conference with VPEL
We have had initial discussions with our VPEL (Virginia Professors of Educational Leadership) colleagues to co-host our Spring 2026 conference (tentatively planned for Mason’s Manassas campus). VPEL recognized that our focus on teacher retention and recruitment through the Inquiry Initiative represented a unique opportunity to collaborate around scholarship and advocacy. Stay tuned!
Best,
Kristien
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Fall 2025 Conference Updates
Registration is open for the fall conference.
Theme: Pathways Forward: Advancing Teacher Education through Research and Innovation
Dates: October 2 and 3, 2025
Location: College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA
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The Teacher Educators' Journal
Call for Manuscripts - Spring 2026 Issue
The Virginia Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators is seeking manuscripts for the spring 2025 edition of the Teacher Educators' Journal. The theme is “Pathways Forward: Advancing Teacher Education through Research and Innovation.
Authors should submit an electronic version of their manuscript using the Manuscript Submission Form. All manuscripts must be received by November 1, 2025 for consideration for the Spring 2026 issue. Please direct all questions about the journal to askTTEJ@gmail.com.
Call for Reviewers
The Teacher Educators’ Journal is seeking reviewers for the Spring 2026 issue of the journal. Those interested need to be active members of VACTE. Faculty, staff, and graduate students are welcome to apply for consideration.
The application can be accessed using the link here and can be found on the VACTE website.
SIG Updates
POLICY & ADVOCACY
The Advocacy and Policy SIG welcomes all VACTE members to sign up for our listserv!
We look forward to seeing everyone at the fall VACTE conference at William and Mary. The Advocacy and Policy SIG will be meeting Thursday, 10/2 from 10:10 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. We hope you’ll join us and share your thoughts and ideas about how we can effectively advocate for high-quality teacher education in Virginia.
We also encourage all VACTE members to sign up for our listserv in advance of the conference! The listserv sign-up is just below the ‘Get Involved’ part of our page on the Advocacy and Policy page of our website.
While you are there, we highly recommend signing up for the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP)’s and Virginia Mercury’s newsletters as well. VPAP offers daily updates on all things involving Virginia’s state and local government news, often with a focus on educational issues. They also do weekly recaps and occasional special reports. The Virginia Mercury also offers a good daily round-up of state-level policy issues.
Advocacy and Policy will soon be making use of the state’s “Lobbyist in a Box” tracking system, available at low cost organizations such as ours. Better tracking means that down the road we’ll need all of YOU to help weigh in with Virginia legislators on pending legislation.
Thanks for joining us next month and we’ll see you at VACTE!
-Jeff and Maggie
