VOLUME 29 NUMBER 2 1 E D I TO R’ S N OT E Introduction and Call to Action Jason Mastrogiovanni, Executive Director, Office for Student Success, Texas A&M University Howdy, JCOTR readers and NODA practitioner communities! I am excited to be serving as the new editor for the Journal of College Orientation, Transition, and Retention and am particularly pleased to bring back the Editor’s Note section. My intent is to use this editorial-style feature to give you an overview of the articles within each issue while intertwining reflections from practice and literature. In this first return to the Editor’s Note, I wanted to begin by telling you about my approach to this work, what I hope to cultivate, and for what they are worth, my opinions about what we need in our profession. JCOTR has long served as a practitioner journal. Previous editors have communicated to me the important role this journal has held in providing a place for young NODA professionals to receive developmental feedback on their writing. My intent is to keep that space open moving forward. However, the journal and our practitioner community are changing in a number of ways. JCOTR moved from being primarily a print journal read by association members to an online open-access publication available to the wider student affairs and higher education communities. Along with this change, the broadening of the association’s primary focus from orientation to orientation, transition, and retention has influenced the way readers of JCOTR come to experience the journal. Increasingly, faculty researchers from all disciplines in higher education are finding JCOTR to be a valid and desirable place to publish work regarding their interventions and inquiries with college students. This development presents our community with many opportunities. The increased access means the historical NODA community has an opportunity to expose its expertise to more disciplines within the academy. Additionally, the NODA community co-mingles its dialogue with new discipline-based perspectives, and the readers of the journal now have the benefit of hearing perspectives beyond the insular community of professional practice. THE JOURNAL OF COLLEGE ORIENTATION, TRANSITION, AND RETENTION2 However, to take advantage of these opportunities, we must meet them actively. I often wonder whether we have lost some of the dialogue that existed within a journal community as we moved to an online environment where visibility and access to scholarship are driven by search engine algorithms and separate articles from the issues in which they originally appeared. Journals like ours represent a venue for practitioners and researchers to get their manuscripts published, providing a needed addition to a developing C.V. At the same time, if articles are not read in their time and place, we lose some opportunities for immediate meaning-making within our community. I believe the journal should be read as it comes out. Readers should disagree with the conclusions of the authors in the issue or add to them in the literature, but regardless we must read them. In this edition of the JCOTR, we begin with a trio of manuscripts that were originally prepared for a special issue on diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the first, DeVries, Santo, and Casas1 deconstruct traditional narratives on persistence by measuring persistence beyond the first college year and disaggregating student populations by their ethnic identity. Next, Ford, Hamilton, Moore, Farmer, Billie, and Taylor present narratives of their experiences as Black graduate students in higher education and student affairs programs to highlight the need for supportive spaces and peer mentorship in graduate preparation programs. Lastly, Crisp, Kolby, and Potter review the existing literature base on transfer partnerships through two equity-focused frameworks (Bensimon & Malcom, 2012; Kania & Kramer, 2011) to develop a three- stage transfer partnership framework of their own. In the next set, we have four featured research articles. Feminella, O’Halloran, and Corbo study the impact of first-year seminar participation on African American students’ academic performance. Buenaflor and Bale use work from Laanan (2001) and O’Bannion (1972, 2009) as theoretical lenses to examine the experiences of five engineering transfer students on academic probation and to propose recommendations for appropriate academic support. Next, Gloria and Her’s survey research examines the impact of parental knowledge obtained through a campus program designed to welcome Hmong parents and provide information about their students’ college experiences. Hmong students remain a relatively understudied population in higher education, and this manuscript adds important insight into the influence familial knowledge can have on college degree attainment. In the last featured article, Kinder, Koduri, and Byrne survey more than 30 graduate student orientation programs to understand the content and operational commonalities across these programs. 1 APA 7 rules regarding the shortening of in-text citations with three or more authors to “et al.” have been intentionally foregone in this Editor’s Note to honor every author who has contributed to this practitioner-focused journal. VOLUME 29 NUMBER 2 3 Finally, this issue concludes with three short articles. An emerging research article by Terrile illuminates the transitional challenges of homeless students through the examination of their support systems in the secondary education system and the complex communication landscape in the higher education system. Heckrote provides a campus note on the practice of increasing question-asking behavior in college students through techniques developed through social capital attainment and problem normalization. Heckrote augments these perspectives with observations from practice. And finally, Johnson and Gansemer-Topf review the book How First-Year and First- Generation Students Navigate Campus Life by Lisa Nunn (2021). These articles represent a cross section of our new reality in the JCOTR. I believe we are well-positioned to serve as an intersection for this work: research and practice, student affairs and faculty cultures, qualitative and quantitative methodologies, NODA returners and first-time readers. Four decades ago, Barr and Fried (1981) called for the field of student affairs to become fluent in the language of the faculty. I believe we are still learning. The NODA voice will always be respected in the orientation space, but I believe the ethos of our association is also needed in the divergent areas of transition and retention (also persistence and student success). If you want to join this conversation, please consider submitting a manuscript. Each voice contributes a unique perspective to our ongoing and evolving discipline. References Barr, M., & Fried, J. (1981). Facts, feelings, and academic credit. New Directions for Student Services, 1981(15), 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.37119811512 Bensimon, E. M., & Malcom, L. (Eds.). (2012). Confronting equity issues on campus: Implementing the equity scorecard in theory and practice. Stylus. Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2011). Embracing emergence: How collective impact addresses complexity. Stanford Social Innovation Review. https://doi.org/10.48558/ZJY9-4D87 Laanan, F. S. (2001). Transfer student adjustment. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2001(114), 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/cc.16 Nunn, L. M. (2021). College belonging: How first-year and first-generation students navigate campus life. Rutgers University Press. O’Banion, T. (1972). Organizing and administering student development programs in the community junior college. Peabody Journal of Education, 49(4), 268¬–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/01619567209537865 O’Banion, T. (2009). An academic advising model. NACADA Journal, 29(1), 83–89.