Dear Readers,

Happy New Year! We are excited to offer for your attention the first 2022 issue of the Journal of Special Education Apprenticeship (JOSEA). This issue is of a particular significance for our editorial team. In August 2021, Dr. Jemma Kim and I took on the roles of JOSEA’s Co-Editors, working closely with Dr. Sang Seok Nam. In the first few months we renewed the Editorial Board and welcomed new board members. We would like to thank our Editorial Review Board for their continued availability to serve as peer reviewers. We also worked with the authors who submitted their manuscripts to the previous editorial team and reviewed newly submitted articles. Thank you for your patience with the Journal during the transition period between the editorial teams. We are grateful to the community of early career faculty, graduate and doctoral students and their advisors, for continuing their research and working on publications despite the difficult times that we live in.

We would like to report that according to the latest Digital Commons Readership Snapshot for October 2021, JOSEA had 927 full-text downloads. While the number of downloads only tells part of the journal’s significance to the field of special education, it is an important number that illustrates that research and practice articles published in JOSEA are reaching a wide audience of scholars and practitioners. We aim to continue providing support and encouragement to the authors while upholding a high level of rigor in reviewing the submissions and promoting scholarship in our field.

This issue includes five articles that illustrate continued and current hot topics in the field. The articles represent a wide focus on all of the stakeholders in special education and their diverse needs: beginning special education teachers, paraprofessionals, parents, and students with disabilities. Larios et al.’s qualitative study examines the district level (mentorship) and the university supports available to alternative certification special education teachers (interns). Their findings emphasize the importance of time factor in finding the school site mentors and establishing supports for beginning teachers, especially those who are getting their credentials while teaching in the field. The study also differentiates between the needs of the first-year and second-year teachers. The article by VanLone and colleagues also focuses on the needs of the pre-service teachers. This single subject design study explores the effects of a video self-analysis package on pre-services teachers’ use of behavior specific praise. The study ties two very promising techniques - video analysis (especially important for beginning teachers) and use of behavior specific praise - into a meaningful and socially valid intervention. Research that focuses on teaching would not be complete without the studies that focus on paraprofessionals. Lichte and Scheef’s work examines the training needs of paraprofessionals who work with students with disabilities. The results of the study indicate the need for training related to specific job requirements and outline the broad list of areas of training reported as critical for paraprofessionals.

Two articles in this issue focus on students with disabilities and needs of their families. The quasi-experimental study by Buxbaum and colleagues investigated comprehension of memes by three groups of adolescents: teens who were deaf or hard of hearing, teens with language disorders, and teens who were typically developing. The findings suggest the need for explicit direct instruction of humor that that includes social media when working with adolescents with disabilities. The study by Gordon et al. turns our attention to the needs of families of students with disabilities in the COVID-19 times. The authors examined online parental guidance and special education documents published by the 50 states and the District of Columbia’s department of education websites. The findings reveal the overwhelming difficulty of such documents with readability levels exceeding the recommended reading levels established by research.

As you can see, the issue touches upon many urgent topics. We hope that you will find it useful and informative. We would like to thank the authors for their high-quality articles and the reviewers for their timely and thorough reviews. We would also like to thank the educators who take the evidence presented in the articles and field-test it translating it into practice that improves the lives and education of diverse learners with disabilities and their families.

Looking forward to new exciting submissions,

Anna Osipova
Jemma Kim
Co-Editors

Articles