We hope you and your loved ones are well and healthy. We are honored to have the opportunity to serve you as Co-Chairs for the upcoming year (2021-2022). Since 2019, we have been enduring the COVID-19 global pandemic, and we hope that during our year of service, we will finally begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Our service at the SRIS began back in 2019 as co-editors of the TESOLers for Social Responsibility Newsletter. Since then, our work has been fully committed to improving and supporting the SRIS community and members by amplifying our voices and by providing spaces where we can explore difficult, vital topics that affect us and those we serve. Our vision this year as Co-Chairs of the SRIS is to continue connecting, empowering, and building a global SRIS community. We plan to do this in three different ways:

1. Fostering new SRIS leadership by empowering Areas of Advocacy (AoA) leaders
2. Enhancing the knowledge of the SRIS community by highlighting AoAs and their work
3. Collaborating with other interest sections and leaders to explore important issues affecting our members and those we serve

Fostering new SRIS leadership by empowering Areas of Advocacy (AoA) leaders.This upcoming year, we have asked the AoA leaders to take a more active role in our community, starting with this special newsletter issue devoted to introducing our SRIS community leadership. Our AoAs and AoA leaders are:

English Learner Advocacy serves to build a community within which equitable practices and pedagogies are examined from the theoretical spectrum, leading to innovative practical applications. (Led by Adil Bentahar, Leigh Anne Shaw, and Edson Ursulo)

Intersections of Identity and Language Teaching aims to raise awareness and foster dialogue and debate about different conceptualizations and practices of identity among our ELT communities. (Led by Carter Winkle, Elisabeth Chan, and Michel Riquelme Sanderson)

Professional Learning serves to connect members of the TESOL community who want to unpack specific areas of social justice and equity in education and includes teacher education, curriculum development, and social justice resources. (Led by Heidi Faust)

Global Issues in Education includes peace, the environment, and economic justice, and focuses on understanding how students, administrators, researchers, and civil society can foster new generations of citizens who care about global issues. (Led by Yecid Ortega and Valerie Jakar)

Enhancing the knowledge of the SRIS community by highlighting AoAs and their work. Starting this year, AoA leaders will plan monthly webinars in which they feature and explore topics of interest for their Areas of Advocacy. The first webinar is titled The Intersectionality of Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Native-Speakerness: Investigating ELT Teacher Identity Through Duoethnography. You can register and find more information about it here: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIsdOitqDwpGNwuNGdRJLYkbvMr48otNca8

Collaborating with other interest sections and leaders to explore important issues affecting our members and those we serve. We are actively working and collaborating with other interest-section leaders to bring to you relevant sections at the TESOL 2022 Convention, where we explore the topic of social responsibility from different perspectives.

Final Thoughts

We end this communication by welcoming our 2021-2022 SRIS leadership, including our Co-Chairs Elect Fatmeh Alalawneh and Bashar Al Hariri, Newsletter Co-Editors John Turnbull and Trisha Dowling, and Community Managers Carter Winkle and Juan Ríos Vega, and our Past Co-Chairs Federico Salas-Isnardi and Sky Lantz-Wagner, who masterfully led our SRIS community through the pandemic. Lastly, we acknowledge and extend our appreciation to Katrina Schmidt and Hetal Ascher for their service as Community Managers last year (2019-2020).

We are looking forward to supporting and learning from all of you.

Ethan and Luis