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Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice

Policies

Contents

Our Publishing Principles

Publishing is about distributing ideas, making links, and building a sense of community through the written word. We seek to ensure that authors who submit their work have a positive experience with the process, even if we are unable to publish their writing. Even if we cannot publish someone’s writing, we try to find ways in which ideas can be distributed and further links made. The following principles guide our publishing:

Opening space for conversation
We aim to publish writings that open space for conversation. The emphasis is on the sharing of educational research and practice and ideas about practice. With each publication we hope to engage readers’ own thoughtfulness and to contribute to discussions within the field of education.
Care with the politics of representation
We want people to have a chance to represent their own experience, rather than authors representing the experiences of others without their participation. This means that, wherever appropriate, anyone referred to has had a chance to read and reflect on the ways they have been represented. We also aim to take care with the politics of how groups of people are represented in relation to gender, class, race, sexual preference, culture, ability, age as well as other areas of diversity.
Direct relevance to educators
We aim to publish research and scholarly writing of direct relevance to educators. We prioritize descriptions of hopeful and helpful work that will provide practical wisdom for those working in the field.
Seeking new authors
As much as is possible, we seek to publish work from new authors, including students. Many practitioners and students do not have a sense that they could write up their work, and we see it as part of our role to offer support, encouragement, and collaboration. We are particularly interested in generating opportunities for young authors and researchers from perspectives, communities and cultures whose work and ideas are often under-represented.
Review process
We have a formal review process for all papers submitted to Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice. Once we have decided that a paper is of relevance for publication in the journal, we send it for peer review by at least two reviewers through a blind review process. Publishing is a collective process. Prior to publication, each piece is also read by editors: to try to forecast the paper’s possible effects on a range of different readers; to check accuracy; to provide feedback for improvement; to address the politics of representation; and so on. The review process is always invigorating. Since we wish to encourage educators to write about their work, we want to make their experience of submitting a good one. Developing a constructive, formal review process is a key part of this.
Expanding the thinking and parameters of educational practice
We seek especially to publish new work that expands our thinking and the parameters of educational practice. We do not want to simply confirm what is already familiar. Perspectives from ‘outside’ the established professional realm can make a significant contribution to refreshing and reconceptualizing wisdom in education.
Archiving history
While our primary focus remains on looking ahead and the development of new ideas, practices, and conversations, we are aware that the written word also serves as a key forum for the documentation of history. We are therefore interested in publishing material that documents the history of education in the Inland Empire region of Southern California.

Guidelines for submitting

Preparing your article for submission

We do not have a word limit, but most articles are less than 5000 words.

Authors should provide a short author statement about their work and interests. Keep the statement to one to three sentences. It may include your workplace, title, kind of work you do, educational interests, and so on. Although they need to be appropriate to a professional journal, these do not need to be overly formal – and we like to give readers some context from which authors are working and/or writing.

To meet some requirements of journal indexing services, please provide an address for correspondence. Ideally, this would be both a postal address and email address. However, if you would prefer to not publish either of these for privacy reasons, you can elect to have correspondence sent to you care of Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice.

Please draft a descriptive abstract of less than 200 words. This should be a summary of your paper, but should not just be a copy of your introduction. It should include the findings as well as the purpose and a description of research methods.

Please also provide a draft list of up to six keywords that cover your paper’s main topics.

Referencing: Your article should contain a list of references. In referencing and general article style, we use ‘APA style’ – the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. For spelling, we use US spelling as per the Websters Dictionary.

Headings make it easy for readers to follow your text. As a guide, each page of your draft should include a heading somewhere. Headings should be brief, descriptive, and relevant to the material which follows.

Identifying material: Please include your name on a separate cover page and remove it and any identifying material from the submitted article and from the references.

Extra material

Endnotes should be kept to a minimum – ideally, try to include all key information in the body of your text, and all reference information in in-text references. Endnotes should be used for explanatory material that would not fit or flow well in the main text. If possible, use your word processing program’s automatic endnote (not footnote) function. Otherwise, just put numbers in two square brackets in your text– like this [[1]] – and then place your numbered endnotes at the end of your paper.

Acknowledgements, if appropriate, can appear in endnotes. To maintain our peer-reviewed status, all writing affiliated with funded projects should acknowledge the funding source/s.

Tables, illustrations, diagrams, and photos (in color or black and white), if relevant, can be included. Tables should be created in the text document using the word processing software’s table function. Other graphic elements can either be provided as separate files, or can be inserted into your document, but from a small original file size (large original files make most word-processed documents too large). If your article is accepted for publication, however, we will need all graphic material to be supplied as a separate image file (either in TIFF, EPS, or JPEG format). Images should be of a file size large enough to reprint at high resolution if the image is run across the width of a page (minimum file size for a photo would be approximately 600kb). If you are taking photos especially to accompany your article, this will mean choosing the highest quality/resolution setting on most digital cameras. In either case, please clearly state the name of which graphic file should appear where, in double square brackets, like this: [[insert file ‘table 1’ here]]. If graphic images require captions for clarity, or to link them to the bodytext, please indicate this and include draft caption text.

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Before you submit your article, please ensure that it is formatted in Garamond font. This is the official font of this journal.

Submitting your article

Submit your article by clicking "Submit Article" in the left-hand sidebar of the journal homepage at https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/wie

All manuscripts should be original work, previously unpublished. Manuscripts are received with the understanding that they are not being submitted simultaneously to another publication.

Manuscripts should be supplied as a word-processed file (not pdf), double-spaced, in 12 point font throughout, including the abstract and references.

When you submit your work, please indicate what kind of work it is intended to be in your cover letter. For example:

  • Research article
  • Literature review
  • Review of book, film, etc
  • Creative work
  • Letter to editor.

Copyediting

After an article has been accepted for publication, it is copyedited for style, grammar, spelling, punctuation, coherence, structure, and so on. While we copyedit every article, we appreciate it when authors take the time themselves to thoroughly check for errors before submission.

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Contact Information

Dr. Angela Clark Louque
Editor
Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice

Dr. Stanley L. Swartz
Editor
Journal of Critical Issues in Educational Practice

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