GUIDELINES FOR SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS
JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing publishes original refereed articles on topics related to the study of curriculum. Specifically, JCT seeks contributions that challenge disciplinary, genre, and textual boundaries. Authors are therefore encouraged to submit papers that undertake scholarly, interdisciplinary discussions of curriculum within forms that are provocative. In addition, submissions are invited that are not limited to print media. A goal of the editors is to utilize emerging electronic technologies to present academic work in ways that complement conventional textual forms.
MANUSCRIPT SPECIFICATIONS
Allowing some latitude for experimental forms, to the extent possible, manuscripts submitted to JCT should conform to the guidelines specified in the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style or the most recent edition of The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
Manuscripts should be double spaced with 1-inch margins and numbered pages. Footnotes should be gathered together at the end of the paper. A 100-150 word abstract must be included as the first page of the manuscript. A submission must include: four copies of the manuscript which exclude all references to authorship, and one title page which includes the name(s) and institutional affiliation(s) of the author(s), and the address, telephone number, and e-mail address of the first author. Manuscripts (including notes and references) should not exceed 25 pages. Manuscripts submitted for publication consideration to JCT should not be under review elsewhere.
Manuscripts submitted to JCT will undergo an initial internal review. Those judged suitable for publication will be externally reviewed. The editors rely heavily on the judgments of the reviewers, but are not bound by them. Manuscripts not accepted for publication will not be returned.
Manuscripts that do not conform to these specifications – or that are not accompanied by an explanatory note detailing why they do not conform – will not be considered for publication.
Manuscripts accepted for publication are subject to non-substantive editing.
SECTION GUIDELINES AND EDITORS’ ADDRESSES
Manuscripts should be submitted to the appropriate section editor. Please review the section descriptions below to determine where you would like your manuscript to receive an initial evaluation and consideration for external review.
Childhood and Cultural Studies
The Childhood and Cultural Studies section will focus on “childhood” as cultural construction, created through artistic and religious visions, historical accounts, cultural politics, the “science” of psychology, popular culture, economics, public policy, educational legislation, and court decisions, and the impact of these constructions on the lives and identities of those who are younger. Example topics include, but are not limited to: examination of the role of history, politics, philosophies of research, and context on beliefs about childhood; exploration of the concepts that have been linked to childhood in historical and contemporary global society(ies) that include care, schooling, language, culture, and life conditions (e.g. poverty, power); and the dichotomization of adult/child, and how problems such as violence and abuse are characterized to empower and disempower children. Mail manuscripts to Gaile Cannella, Division of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, Arizona State University, Mail Code 1411, Tempe, AZ 85287. <Gaile.Cannella (at) asu.edu>
International Curriculum Discourses
The International Curriculum Discourses section is committed to developing international dialogue on curriculum issues. For example, 1. If the postcolonial critique of Western epistemology encourages ways of knowing that are more ecumenical (GK. oikoumenikos, “of the inhabited earth”), how can these be brought more clearly into the centre of curriculum of deliberation?; 2. If intellectual colonization continues, albeit in diffuse and hidden forms, how can we attempt to crucially interrogate the colonial present, so that we may move closer to a truly postcolonial state?; 3. Contemporary Euro-American power structures are attempting to make the entire enterprise of public education accountable to Market forces. What is the unique responsibility of Curriculum Theory in meeting the challenge of such pressure?; 3. What is the particular poverty of curriculum theorizing today, and what international/ intercultural resources can be accessed to alleviate that poverty? This section invites papers on these or other themes that directly take up the task of broadening curriculum work in a “globalizing” world. Mail manuscripts to Yatta Kanu, Department of Curriculum, Humanities, and Social Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3T 2N2, <kanuy (at) ms.umanitoba.ca>
Literacies
“Literacies” is to be understood broadly to include reading, writing, and interpreting texts in various forms – not only books, arts, and film but also reading and writing the world and reading and writing oneself into the world. The following areas are of interest: Literacy of the self – the relationship between reading texts and the context of lived experience, including psychic life: In what ways does reading poetry, fiction, and drama provide a theoretical base for my work? What do I read for? What reading has changed my life? Social literacy – the construction of literacy in the classroom: What texts have changed the life of students? How has shared reading provided new understandings of classroom dynamics? What readings don’t work? Modes of expressing literacy – creative work, including short fiction and poetry and nontraditional forms. Mail manuscripts, not to exceed fifteen pages, to Mary Aswell Doll, 527 E. 56 Street, Savannah, GA 31405 and include a disk. <mdoll4444 (at) aol.com>
[Popular] Culture Matters
This section of JCT is committed to celebrating without colonizing [popular] culture matters. Manuscripts should bring youth cultures, generational cultures, gothic cultures, cultures of information technology and technoscience, academic cultures, music, television, film and other media into the discourses of curriculum theorizing; likewise, manuscripts should bring curriculum theorizing and educational practice to cultural studies movements, web-cultures, hypermedia analysis, alternative representations, and alternative mass media. Advertising and other mind-altering experiences, vampires, school practices as commodities and cultural resources, digital entertainment industries, extreme sports, and their implications for new postmodern identities and curriculum work are particularly encouraged. The primary perspective of this section asks manuscripts to challenge the presumptions that telescope culture into “popular” or “consumer culture”-and to challenge the boundaries of traditional curriculum studies that fear the relevance of cultural studies movements for educational practice-by declaring that [popular] culture does matter. Mail manuscripts to John Weaver, Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading, Georgia Southern University, Post Office Box 8144, Statesboro, GA 30460-8144. E-mail <jweaver (at) gsaix2.cc.gasou.edu>
Reading Between the Lines: Perspectives on Contemporary Cultural Texts
This section solicits manuscripts that explore perspectives on contemporary cultural texts. This may include any artifact or event-including books, movies, art installations, television shows, theater productions, performance art, arts-based research, computer software, home pages, and so on-that, in some manner, relates to JCT’s focuses on curriculum theory and classroom practice. Mail manuscripts to Greg Dimitriadis, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, Graduate School of Education, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Christopher Baldy Hall, Room 468, Box 601000, Buffalo, NY 14260-1000. 617-645-2471 x 1088, <gjd3 (at) acsu.buffalo.edu> or Denise Taliaferro Baszile, School of Education, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056.
Reconceptual Inquiries in Practice and Politics
This section of the journal focuses on curriculum theorizing of educational practice and work in the politics of education. The aim is to foster increased interconnections among reconcep-tualizations of such work. For example, submissions might use specific instances of curriculum work in practice or political action as the basis for a new conceptual discourse. Or an article might employ a series of examples of curriuclum theory in action to disrupt the logic of a theorization of practice or politics. Yet another possibility is to interpret an event or project in curriculum practice or educational politics through the insights of several previously published JCT articles, in order to challenge curriculum theorizing to speak more to other work in curriculum theory. Submissions to this section should NOT confuse reconceptual inquiry with empirical research, “applications” or “translations” of theory, or some sort of “verification” of theory. Rather, the purpose of this section of the journal is to promote increased attention to new and exciting work in curriculum studies from a perspective that challenges existing political and theoretical discourses. Send manuiscripts to Peter Appelbaum, Department of Education, Arcadia University, 450 South Easton Road, Glenside, PA 19038. 215-572-4476. E-mail <appelbaum (at) arcadia.edu>
Poststructural Lines of Flight
This section provides a space for work in poststructural theorizing. Manuscripts are sought that challenge and question not only the central themes, organizing metaphors, and discursive strategies constituting Western [educational curriculum] thought and informing the Enlightenment project, but all that is modernism itself, including those perspectives and cultural structures associated with moderism. Work, as well, that is multidisciplinary, that deconstructs the bifurcations, strict disciplinarity, and entrenchment of much educational/curriculum research from various poststructural perspectives is sought. Send manuscripts to William M. Reynolds, Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Research, Post Office Box 8144, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia 30460-8144. Email <wrey (at) gasou.edu>.
Studies in Philosophy, Ethics, and Education
How does the engagement of philosophy and education within the field of social and cultural practices redefine the ethical bounds of pedagogy? How does this foregrounding of the relationship between philosophy, ethics, and education affect our responsibility to re-think and revolutionize what it means to teach, to learn, to know? Studies in Philosophy, Ethics, and Education focuses on and probes the articulation of the tensions among the discursive spaces and the real-world dimensions of an interdisciplinary nexus of theory and practuce that informs and manifests the pedagogical application of ideas. Any critical engagement and identification with a philosophical or theoretical position and its performative direction (e.g., a theorem, a system, a methodology, a “proof,” an ideology, an argument) implies the pragmatic outworking of an academic responsibility we have to uphold an obligation owed to the search for truth at all costs. This is what makes theory practice and provides a justifying principle, a principle of reason for what we think, do, and write. Studies in Philosophy, Ethics, and Education converges upon specific interpretations of the obligation we have to respond responsibly to the alterity of those we teach, research, and write for beyond ourselves. It seeks to present texts that challenge us to reflect upon and to re-examine the ethics and logic of the boundaries of “thought” and “action,” “theory” and “practice,” and what comprises and displaces the opposition of these two entities in the name of pedagogy. The point of this section is to highlight work that complicates and radicalizes the normative limits of academic responsibility and its ethics in the hopes of making the relation between the philosophical and the pedagogical more responsive to the difference of another. Studies in Philosophy, Ethics, and Education makes the assumption that there is value to opening the empirico-conceptual and epistemic limits of one’s work and oneself to the risk of less than canonical modes of thinking. It therefore solicits texts from theorists and educators whose practice has and is struggling to re-think the ethics and politics of dominant modes of knowledge and the pedagogical forms of expression that have operated within the institutional purview of a traditional system of education. One of its aims is to relocate the epistemic and performative parameters of the scene of teaching beyond a normative axis of response and responsibility. Studies in Philosophy, Ethics, and Education challenges the form and content of seemingly benign dimensions of what has been protected under the aegis of an existing codification of social infrastructures and their prevailing cultural conditions as the “knowledge worth knowing.” Mail manuscripts to Peter Pericles Trifonas, Center for Social Justice and Cultural Studies in Education, Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada. (416) 923-6641 ext. 2760, <ptrifonas (at) oise.utoronto.ca>
Feature Articles and Artwork
Manuscripts that do not conform to the specifications of one of the sections above should be submitted to the JCT Editorial Office for consideration as a feature article. Be sure to follow all manuscript submission guidelines when submitting feature articles as well as special section articles to JCT. All manuscripts for feature articles, submissions of art work for the cover and other pages of the journal, and all general correspondence should be directed to:
Adam Howard, Editor
editors@jctonline.org
