For our first issue, we begin by asking a fundamental question: What is a "critical social educator"? That is, how do classroom teachers, researchers, and others understand what it means to be critical?

This inaugural issue features five articles wrestling with what it means to be a critical social educator. In their article centering pre-service teachers, Christine Rogers Stanton and Hailey Hancock (2021) share how they used PhotoVoice as an avenue to examine their students’ developing identities and relationships to teaching social studies content. In their piece grounded in critical global education, Gerardo J. Aponte-Safe and Hanadi Shatara (2021) share an in-depth analysis of state-level standards to demonstrate how educators can bring global perspectives into their elementary social studies classrooms. Cassie Brownell and Anam Rashid (2021) unpack how a white, critical social educator provided children with the opportunity to engage in critical conversations around race using children’s literature. Similarly, Mary Adu-Gyamfi, Angie Zapata, and Sarah Reid (2021) richly describe how picturebooks provide an avenue for teachers to engage in critical discussions around race and racism with young students. In the final article, Ryan Oto, Ngan Nguyen, Megan Custer, Peder Ericson, and Nick Liebelt (2021) emphasize how building and strengthening a small teacher collective committed to critical practices is essential to sustaining critical social education in classroom teaching practice.

These authors in The Critical Social Educator’s first issue bravely engage in critical work with young children, classroom teachers, preservice teachers, and curriculum. We want to thank these authors not only for their wonderful ideas, but for their patience and support during the process of shepherding the inaugural issue to publication. We are grateful to middle school student Jaquelin Fernandez Zepeda for contributing this issue's beautiful cover art, and we also wish to thank you, our first readers, for turning the digital pages of this inaugural issue. Creating The Critical Social Educator is not an experience we take lightly, and we fully embrace the responsibility to continue building the journal where we can all be heard, valued, and where we can continue to learn.