Growth Through Inclusive Professional Practices
Over the course of the past few years, listening, learning, and communicating the needs and intentions of our diverse membership has been a major highlight of my professional career. I am grateful for the guidance that I have received from my fellow AMTE board colleagues and in particular the dedication and leadership of past-president Enrique Galindo and our executive director Kim Gill. Their perspectives, professional connections, and expertise in various educational contexts continue to inform and guide present and future AMTE work critical to our community and mathematics teacher education.
I am humbled and deeply honored to be starting my role as AMTE president following the 2025 Annual Conference and am energized to continue to collaborate with brilliant and dedicated board members and division and committee leaders to serve the evolving needs of our mathematics teacher education community. Our vibrant AMTE membership represents a caring professional community and serves as an academic family to many of us - critically important during challenging times and in support of teacher education. Together we are committed to creating an even more inclusive space that welcomes and benefits from the professional, research, teaching, service, and partnership experiences of current and future AMTE members.
In preparation for the 2025 AMTE Annual Conference Opening session, Dr. Beth Herbel-Eisenmann, Dr. Nicol Howard, Dr. Lateefah Id-Deen, and Dr. Carlos Lopez Leiva, and I had a wonderful time sharing and co-constructing an interactive session titled “Moving Beyond Transactional Relationships in Educational Spaces” to meet the needs of our communities. During the conference in Reno, NV, we had the pleasure to engage with our AMTE membership in authentic, relational ways as the interdisciplinary panel shared their unique and deeply personal journeys while providing critical guidance to conference participants. Through friendship, humanity, and collegiality the panel beautifully modeled these essential ways of knowing and ways of being.
In that spirit, I would like to highlight some of their important recommendations towards moving beyond transactional relationships in our own educational spaces. Lateefah urged us to “Make relationship-building a core practice, not just an extra step”. Nicol encouraged us to “Build trust and be present...Listen and design opportunities for authentic relational engagement”. Carlos demonstrated the importance of being vulnerable in public spaces and to “straddle borders and powers of transactionality and relationality”. And Beth reminded us of the importance of this life-long commitment to “Approach the work with humility; embrace tensions and failures as opportunities to learn”. This opening session represented a memorable reminder and a highlight in my professional career to envision, co-construct, and enact leading with kindness, professionalism, vulnerability, and trust in public spaces. May such gatherings empower us to be together, move together, and hold each other up in our professional journeys.
Moving forward, consistent with AMTE’s long term goals for 2024-2028, together we need to engage in community building and other efforts to support the recruitment and retention, diversification, and professional learning of mathematics teacher educators and leaders who serve in a variety of educational contexts. To serve the evolving needs of students, educators, schools, and our communities, we must strengthen the research and research-based practices of mathematics teacher educators in a multitude of contexts and educational settings. Together we can envision and promote intentional approaches to strategically bring together Mathematics, STEM, Data Science, Statistics education research efforts - including dissemination and implementation at K-12 and post-secondary settings - to continue to serve the needs of our diverse communities and schools.
In the words of Dr. Dorothy White - during her Judith Jacobs Lecture at the conference - “In the midst of it all, we must remember to dream and believe that we can reimagine and create our field as a welcoming and humanizing space for all.” As an organization, we need your voices and perspectives, your strength and brilliance, and your humanity and collegiality in each of our AMTE spaces and leadership positions. Looking forward to serving and leading our organization so that together we continue to grow through inclusive professional practices, intentionality, and resilience for years to come.
Farshid Safi, AMTE President