Current Issues in Education > Volume 1, 1998 > Number 1

Citation Information

Poynor, L. (1998, November 18). Editor's Notes. Current Issues in Education [On-line], 1 (1). Available: http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume1/number1/.

Editor's Notes

Leslie Poynor
Arizona State University

A good friend of mine asked me, "So, what's the philosophical orientation of your new journal?" My first inclination was to respond, "Oh, we don't have a philosophical orientation. We're neutral." Yet, neutral would not be an accurate reflection of our editorial board made up entirely of Arizona State University, College of Education graduate students. We are young (in terms of our careers), energetic, and passionate; and our CIE office has been filled with intense philosophical debates. We are anything but neutral. Nonetheless, we all share an interest in establishing dialogue between areas of education that are rarely brought together. (In fact, the early working title of our journal was Dialogos, the Greek word for dialogue, but unfortunately another journal had already claimed that name.) To that end we see our diverse backgrounds, experiences, areas of expertise and paradigms as sources of strength. For our inaugural issue we purposefully invited authors that would reflect this diversity.

Our authors are in different places in their professional lives--some are established professionals; some others are graduate students. They hail from a variety of university affiliations and offer different areas of expertise. The commentary by the Dean of our College of Education, David Berliner, sets the stage for the eclectic nature of the articles included in our first issue. He begins by reminding us of Thorndike's unrealized prediction that all educational problems would be solved in 20 years and then dedicates his support to a journal whose vision recognizes the complexity of educating human beings, a complexity that Thorndike seems to have missed. Representative of that complexity are the two articles by author David Fetterman and authors John Dugan and John Behrens. Using the rapidly changing technologies of the Internet and the World Wide Web, these authors provide us with two very different looks at research and data analysis. From yet another perspective on research in education, author Paula Wolfe presents us with a classroom study of how gender inequities are played out in real ESL high school classrooms. Turning to the area of special education, author Michael Roman and authors Jeffery Miller, Michael Tansy, and Tammy Hughes offer us reviews of the literature on nonverbal learning disabilities and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1997, respectively. In a more traditional review of the literature, authors Lisa Aaroe and Ron Nelson describe how students with disabilities view the curriculum.

As would be expected in the first issue of a new journal, the selection process for articles was somewhat different than it will be in the future. Authors were invited to contribute because of their different backgrounds, experiences, areas of expertise and paradigmatic views. As our invited guests, they were given complete freedom in how they chose to participate in our first issue. The variety in writing styles demonstrates different approaches to the articles and different degrees to which they made use of Internet possibilities. Although all the articles in this issue were solicited, we did review (and debate over) the articles extensively. We thank our reviewers for dedicating the time, energy, and expertise to reviewing articles that had already been accepted. We thank our authors for accepting the reviewers' comments and working with us in the spirit of compromise to make their articles accessible to readers outside their areas of expertise. In so doing, our authors have helped us to realize our goal of establishing dialogue between areas of education that are rarely brought together.

With this brief introduction, we invite our readers to approach these articles in the spirit of dialogue and to join us in the discussion of these issues. In January of 1999, well before the publication of our Spring issue, we invite you to participate in an unmediated and unmoderated exchange on our inaugural issue by subscribing to and participating in the Current Issues of Education listserv. Finally, we encourage you to keep an eye out for our second issue in which author Marina Gair will remind us not to accept our new journal as the panacea to communication in education, but rather to keep a critical eye on the role of technology in perpetuating or challenging the status quo. The dialogue should be interesting to say the least. On the behalf of the CIE editorial board, I welcome you and look forward to your participation in the ongoing debate and conversation.

Authors

Leslie Poynor is a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Curriculum and Instruction program at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on Bilingual/ESL education, literacy education, and teacher education. She co-teaches a section of Teaching Reading in Bilingual/ESL classrooms to senior level pre-service teachers. Leslie may be reached at lpoynor@asu.edu.

Acknowledgements

The first issue of Current Issues in Education would not have been possible without the support of the following people:

• David C. Berliner, Dean of the College of Education. David's original vision for an on-line journal was the seed that has been brought to fruition in this issue. Without his financial, intellectual, philosophical, and emotional support this journal would not have happened.
• Jim Middleton, Faculty Advisor. Jim spent many hours giving advice, offering support and basically "leaving us alone" to do our job. He was there when we needed him, but respectful of our growing expertise and professionalism as future academicians.
• Gene V Glass, Unofficial Faculty Advisor. Although not our official faculty advisor, Gene spent countless hours helping us with the technological side of our journal as well as the day-to-day running of it. We could always count on him when we were in a bind.
• Gail Hackett, Another Unofficial Faculty Advisor. Like Gene, Gail stepped in to offer advice and provide us support as we neared publication. Her support in the last few weeks prior to publication were invaluable.
• Teri Kennedy, Assistant to the Dean. As assistant to the Dean, Teri served as a source of support, a fountain of information, and an incredibly flexible gatekeeper when we desperately needed to talk to David. She handled many of the details that made this journal possible.
• Heidi Hagen. As we began organizing publicity for the first issue, Heidi lent her time and expertise to the task. She pointed us the right direction and often took on extra responsibilities in order to help us meet our deadline.
• Margaret Carr. Margaret spent many hours checking links and catching typographical errors to make our publication the professional document it is.
• Tara Jennings, Assistant Editor. Tara was the person coordinating the review process. She maintained contact with all of the Associate Editors, set and enforced deadlines, and even jumped in to do some reviewing and copy editing herself when the occasion called for it.
• Carol Koroghlanian, Lars Leader, and Charalambos Vrasidas, Design Editors. These are the people that made the journal possible. They formatted the articles for the journal and in some cases reworked them so that we had a smooth, accessible publication. They spent countless hours formatting articles, checking links, revising articles according to the copy editing suggestions of the Associate Editors. They also took care of all the behind-the-scenes technology such as getting our server running and establishing our database and creating the site itself.
• Sandy Andrews, Marina Gair, Sarah Hart, Tammy Hughes, Carla McAuliffe, and Jo Steig, Associate Editors. These are the people who are responsible for sending the article to reviewers, coordinating reviews, consolidating reviews and sending an acceptance, revise or reject recommendation to the editor. They also put in countless hours of copy editing and link testing to make the first issue sharp and clean.
• Reviewers. The reviewers that participated in this first issue took the job seriously and responded in a timely and professional manner. We thank them for their expertise and time.
• Authors. We thank our authors for participating in an unknown and unpublished journal. We appreciate the level of professionalism and respect that they demonstrated in both their publications and their interactions with a novice editorial board.