Acknowledgments

Editing this volume has been a tremendous undertaking. I am grateful to all of the chapter authors for their wonderful contributions. I was honored to receive the fine manuscripts they gave me.

I am also grateful to the editorial team at the University of Kansas for their perspectives and feedback on the various chapters. Their efforts have enriched this work. In addition, many mentors at KU have also made direct or indirect contributions to my thinking around this book. These mentors include Dr. Robert Rowland in the Communications department, Drs. Amy Devitt and Mary Jo Reiff in the English department, and Drs. Hyesun Cho, Heidi Hallman, and Mary Lynn Hamilton in the Curriculum and Teaching department.

The authors of the section introductions added additional layers of complexity to the project. Many of these section authors are colleagues from the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) and the Narrative and Research special interest groups of the American Educational Research Association. My participation in those communities continues to challenge what it means to know, to learn, and to teach.

Much thanks is necessary for the incredible insights and inquiries from Drs. Karen Vignare and Leanna Archambault in the foreword and the afterword. I cannot say enough about how honored I am for their participation in this project and for the time they put into reading and responding to this manuscript.

Drs. Melissa Newberry and Stefinee Pinnegar at Brigham Young University also deserve much acknowledgement and thanks for their support of this project and for their help in polishing several of the chapters. For almost a decade now, Stefinee has continually encouraged me to trust myself as a person and a scholar.

Drs. Don Deshler and Daryl Mellard at the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities at the University of Kansas have also provided much mentorship and support for my development as a scholar in general as well as in regards to this project. In addition, I have much appreciation for my colleague Jesse Pace at the center who had nothing but encouragement and good advice for me during this long process. In acknowledging these layers of support, it should also be noted that a portion of the work done on this manuscript occurred as part of my work at the center, which is funded by the Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs.

Finally, I offer my thanks to my co-author Richard Allen Carter Jr. who worked with me on various aspects of this book in the library at the center where we work, his office space in a back corner of the Special Education department, at disjoined tables next to a campus snack bar, via barely serviceable cell phone and Internet connections from locations in the hills of North Carolina, and as he drove through the mountains of West Virginia. At one point, I recommended that he disappear around the time when the next deadline was approaching to save himself some trouble. “Where would I hide?” he responded. Where – indeed.