Dear AAALGrads Community,

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In preparing for the previous issue of AAALGrads, we called for articles that questioned some of the “new normals'' that have emerged within our academic communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also asked authors to discuss what we could learn from our experiences during that time and what we could/should carry forward. While these are, of course, topics that continue to be relevant to AAALGrads readers, with several themed issues behind us, we felt it was time to broaden the scope (once again) to any and all topics that potential authors felt were relevant to our graduate student community. We hoped to receive a wide range of proposals that would showcase an array of scholarly areas that our graduate student community was engaged with at the time. 

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After shortlisting all of the interesting proposals and reviewing the full manuscripts as they were submitted, we are happy to say now that the AAALGrads Community exceeded our expectations. 

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In this issue, we have five Feature articles, two Professional Development Corner articles, and one Creative Corner article. Together, they cover a lot of ground. The Feature articles begin with Xiao Tan’s discussion of multimodal composition, continue to issues regarding reflexivity (Rowland Imperial), cognitive biases (David Perrodin), and complexity (Sarvenaz Balali) in research, and conclude with Daeun Shin’s reflection on multiculturalism in graduate student teaching. In the Professional Development Corner, Tim Hampson shares tips from his experiences as a conference organizer, and Yoko Mori advocates for cultivating successful cross-cultural mentorships. Finally, in the Creative Corner, Katherine Ortolani rounds out the issue with an interesting call for the use of role-playing games in English language teaching. 

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As always, we are grateful to all of the authors who contributed to the issue and who were patient with us as we co-constructed the final version alongside our lengthy list of other commitments. This will be the last issue produced by the current team, and as we move on to allow for others to take the newsletter in their own directions, we cannot help but look back with pride and satisfaction. It has been a great run, and we look forward to seeing what the future holds for the newsletter. 

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Welcome to the Spring 2022 issue of AAALGrads.

 

Sincerely,

Nathan Thomas, Katherine Kerschen, Mariana Lima Becker, and Sooyoung Kang

Co-Editors

 

 

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