ABSTRACT
Care is a complex endeavor in education, with no one standard definition and no one recognized enactment. Although the COVID-19 pandemic was not the cause of this revelation, it did emphasize the fractures in perceptions and enactments of care due to the complexity inherent to teachers and teaching—and the repercussions of disrupting that delicate balance for all those involved in teacher education, from preservice teachers and teacher candidates to novice teachers and education faculty. In this introduction, the authors contextualize the impetus for this edited collection, detail the complexities of care within the currently disrupted ecosystem of teacher education, and argue that a reexamination of care in teacher education is warranted as we move forward from the pandemic. Nothing requires teacher education to return to previous understandings and enactments of care. In fact, the authors argue the opposite: that our navigation of COVID-19 requires us to reconceptualize what we know and reconsider what we do post pandemic as caring teacher educators.
