Nearly two decades as Managing Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory: A changing role with a changing journal in a changing world

At the age of 53, I needed something to stretch my brain so, my friend Peter Fitzsimons encouraged me to join him in enrolling in a Masters of Education at University of Auckland. I was lucky, as it was the time when wonderful philosophy of education scholars such as Jim Marshall, Michael Peters and Peter Roberts were my lecturers. I had a background in science and maths so writing philosophy or any essays was certainly a challenge. Thanks to the generous, patient supervision of Jim Marshall, the great lecturers I listened to, and the many hours of time I spent with Peter, drinking vast quantities of coffee, while he helped me understand the philosophical concepts I was struggling with, I graduated with a MEd with First Class Honours. Little did I realise this degree would give me an entry to the amazing and changing role that I have enjoyed for the past 17 years or so with EPAT.

My first introduction to Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT) was helping Peter to coordinate the reviewing of the paper copies of submissions that Michael and Jim received by mail. Three copies of each paper were submitted and two were then posted on to the two reviewers. My first job was to address envelopes and stick the stamps on. It was a very slow, labour-intensive process with some papers getting waylaid along the way. In those days only three issues a year were published.

Peter became frustrated by this labour-intensive process so, using his skills as a technical man, he built an Access platform for moving the process online. Many still posted in their submissions but the more technical-savvy authors began to use email attachments and these could be emailed on to reviewers whenever possible and managed by Access. At about this stage Peter became PESA president and I officially took over his role.

Before this there had been a very small attendance at the 2002 Conference and it was feared that PESA could become extinct. In 2003, I was employed to organise the PESA conference held at Auckland University. This for me was another jump into the community of POE scholars, most at that time from Australasia. As I look through the 35 abstracts in PESA archives I see many familiar names, most who are still authors or reviewers for EPAT. The conference numbers have gone from strength to strength since then.

By the end of 2005, it was becoming a little difficult to manage the number of submissions to EPAT using the Access platform and Michael had the foresight to arrange with the then publisher to use the online ManuscriptCentral platform. Years later Jackson and Stewart note that,

“Academic publishing has undergone a vast transformation in the last decade, along with clear beneficial and harmful impacts for higher education researchers. Journals cannot ignore the value of going online, something that was viewed as daring at the turn of the twenty-first century.” (Jackson & Stewart, 2017)

The first submission to ManuscriptCentral was received on 10 May 2006 but was rejected. Olli‐Pekka Moisio’s What it Means to be a Stranger to Oneself was the second submission and it was published in EPAT, Volume 41-5. Nearly, 40 articles were submitted to ManuscriptCentral in that first year although more will have been sent to me by email from those who could not manage the online system. Six issues of the journal were published in 2006.

It took me many hours to become familiar with the processes and work-arounds needed with the early versions of ManuscriptCentral, it was a game changer. With this online submission process, plus the advertising that Michael did in his travels and conference attendances, the number of submissions began to rise, confirming the wise decision to move to ManuscriptCentral. The platform still had a great many bugs and this required research to find circumventions, but each update of the code has improved things, resulting in the very user-friendly platform that we have today.

The ManuscriptCentral help people were always available although answers to queries could take several days.

In those first years, many of the older authors and reviewers were not yet comfortable in the online world and became frustrated so some of my time was spent nurturing them though the processes of online submissions or uploading their submissions by proxy.

In the past, at EPAT and other journals, the Managing Editor role was carried out by somebody from a university in their spare time. Some of the PESA Committee were unsure about the need for a paid Managing Editor but I believe it was because I had the time to help with the outreach and advertising that the journal was able to add the many scholars that Michael and others collected to ManuscriptCentral.

In those days, one could send broadcast emails from ManuscriptCentral with Calls for Papers to Special Issues or to ask reviewers to update their keywords. EPAT Newsletters could also be sent out to all users of ManuscriptCentral. With the changing world of unsolicited advertising via these type of broadcast emails ManuscriptCentral denied this ability and I had to resort to MailChimp to send out bulk messages, but it was time demanding and eventually it fell by the wayside.

The biggest thing I have noticed during my years as Managing Editor has been the increase in all aspects of the Philosophy of Education community involved in EPAT. Various stats on EPAT numbers reflect the now widespread reach of the journal. As this graph shows there has been an ongoing increase in issues published per year.

We have been doing 14 issues a year since Volume 46 in 2014 and have so many articles in the online backlog, that we could now easily increase that number. The number of submissions to the journal has increased year by year with 146 submissions to ManuscriptCentral in 2014 and there will be well over 400 by the end of 2021. The number of reviewers in the database shows the same increasing trend, as does the impact factor of the journal which has slowly increased until EPAT is now a leader in its field. The recent review of downloads and citations of EPAT articles also shows a huge increase.

By 2014, the authors’ geographical home locations had expanded, although these places were still mainly from the western side of the globe. Three years’ later submission numbers had jumped to over 250 and the global reach was beyond the usual countries of Europe, the UK, USA and Australasia, with authors from places like Scandinavia, Iceland, South America, Taiwan and Korea. Ruyu Hung and her special Chinese issue introduced EPAT readers to many Asian scholars of Philosophy of Education.

In the last 12 months, we have had submissions from over 57 countries and thanks to Michael and Tina’s contacts at Beijing Normal University, China is now the major submitting country. The next most common are shown in this table.

Table

Country	Number of manuscripts	Percentage (%)
China	117	21.6
United States	61	11.3
Australia	47	8.7
UK	34	6.3
New Zealand	24	4.4

This expansion to the Eastern cultures has brought a new challenge of finding available and competent reviewers for their articles. Jian Li & Eryong Xue are two Chinese scholars who have done a great deal to expand the readers and authors in China. They have submitted many articles as can be seen if one browses through the recently published online articles at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=rept20.

After so many years in this role, I had a very good knowledge of most of the reviewers in the ManuscriptCentral database and found it very easy to assign suitable reviewers. But, I have very little knowledge of reviewers for papers from such different cultures and this has taken much more time because of the research needed.

It has brought home to me the Eurocentric view of Philosophy of Education that has been held for many years. As Peters says,

“…I am conscious of the need to establish the grounds for a production of some East–West exchanges and conversations about education within the context of the future of the Asia-Pacific and the Asian Century. In my view philosophy of education, suitably extended and renovated, has a relevant and useful part to play especially with effective philosophical speculation concerned the philosophical shape of the Asia-Pacific, and whether it can free itself from the militaristic Cold War mentality and particularly the new Australian aggressiveness symbolized by AUKUS.” (Peters et al., 2021)

My youthful education and upbringing were geared to reinforcing the notion that European is best. I am thankful that my study in Philosophy of Education and the many EPAT submitted articles and editorials I have read have taught me about Colonisation and the damage this has done to indigenous cultures. My reading of articles from non-western scholars has led me to realise the supremacy of western scholars is a lie.

In his Editorial for EPAT, Jason Arday argues strongly that,

“Historically, Higher Education within the UK has been situated within a White, Eurocentric majority context, which has often conflicted with egalitarian ideals associated with diversification and representation within predominantly White spaces.” (Arday, 2021)

And he was guest editor for the Special Issue on Race, Equality and Social Mobility in Education published in Volume 53 which was devoted to articles on these topics.

Another trend I have noticed is the changing role of women in EPAT. There is no report from ManuscriptCentral that can generate numbers of women scholars but I have noticed a rise in women authors. There was certainly an increase in the percentage of women attending PESA Conferences from 2003 when the room was full of men with a few women scattered around to recent years when there have been many women presenters and attendees. Liz Jackson and Amy N. Sojot are currently organising a Series of Editorials on the Women Presidents of PESA. Calling for change: A feminist approach to women in art, politics, philosophy and education. So far two interviews, with Nesta Devine and Felicity Haynes, have been published online (2021). Other articles calling for change in this field have been submitted. Elizabeth Grierson states

“Continuing insurgency for political and social reconstruction is worth the effort if it changes the life of one woman. It is crucial that a philosophy of education undertakes the work for revolutionary change as it once was and could be again.” (Grierson, 2019)

Simone Galea argues for the

“active participation of women in philosophy of education and the importance of their sexually differentiated positions in pluralising knowledge.” (2019)

And she goes further to say

Such spaces should be open and hospitable to persons who have the interests in pluralising philosophical knowledge through critical engagement of the limits of their own practice. The feminist project of diversifying knowledge should be recognised as contributing to a deeper exploration of the struggle for epistemic diversity in philosophy of education in parallel to and in conjunction with non-white, not straight and non-western methods of inquiry. (Galea, 2019)

With the looming climate warming issues, topics on sustainability and the environment are increasing. A whole issue on Education for Sustainable Development in the ‘Capitalocene’ is published as Volume 54-3 with Editors Helena Pedersen, Sally Windsor and several others.

Big data and AI are other topics attracting authors to critique. For example, Julian Sefton-Green & Luci Pangrazio’s comment in their article

“In the context of profound social change wrought by digital technologies, this article focuses on what we [the authors] speculate will be the slow death of the critical ‘educative subject. We argue this is the consequence of the recalibrations in human agency that arise from the data-driven model of digital governance in the social world.” (Sefton-Green & Pangrazio, 2021)

Over the last two years, the big change has been the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. With the move to online teaching and the efforts of universities to cut costs, staff have been put under enormous pressure. This has impacted my ability to find available reviewers. Many of our loyal reviewers now do not answer my invites, or decline, or may be weeks late if they do agree to help.

A large number of articles have been submitted on the pandemic and one only has to go to scroll through the articles recently published online for EPAT to see this. https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=rept20.

I mention the inclusion of the ACCESS journal, which EPAT incorporated about 2015, when we published two issues for several years with Elizabeth Grierson as the hard-working editor. It has now been revived, by Tina Besly, in the PESA Agora suite with Nesta Devine as current editor. View at https://pesaagora.com/.

I am proud to have been part of the team of EPAT editors, especially because of the kindness shown to our authors. Most reviewers work hard to be encouraging even when rejecting a paper and Michael is always generous with his decisions allowing for revisions to be submitted whenever possible. Chris Higgins was interviewed by Liz Jackson and he says,

An editor should be the kind of person who can enter sympathetically and critically into a wide range of arguments… The qualities of a good editor as an arbiter are the qualities of a good interpreter or reader: somebody who can enter sympathetically into an argument without losing themselves and their ability to pose critical questions along the way. (Jackson, 2017)

I believe our editors embrace this attitude and also many of our reviewers respond with very helpful reviews even when rejecting. They take the time to encourage the authors as to how to improve their work.

A major intention of my role has been to correspond with authors in a friendly, helpful manner and I get a great deal of feedback about how much this is appreciated. Our authors and reviewers are the mainstay of the journal and in my view, they must be appreciated and encouraged.

I believe one of the reasons EPAT has remained so successful is because of the innovations that Michael and other editors keep introducing. An interesting one has been the Collective Writing series whereby many authors collaborate on one article. For example, Daniel Crain recently submitted an article with 13 authors (2021). And several other articles with many authors have been submitted for the Philosophy in a New Key series.

Over the last few years, I have very much enjoyed the huge community of scholars that I am in touch with through EPAT. Some of these have become very good pen pals and our relationship has developed without us ever meeting.

Another very great pleasure has been attending the annual PESA Conferences using the generous support that PESA gave me. My first was at the 2013 conference in Melbourne. I felt very out of place and a bit of an imposter among so many scholars but I met many of my pen pals and I was soon generously welcomed as a bona fide member of that community and for me this feeling of belonging to a special community continued until 2019. I was able to attend and learn from many of the presentations I attended and had a great deal of fun meeting people from the other side of the world at the lunches and dinners. I was also able to enrol many reviewers who were not already in our database.

Unfortunately, this pleasure was first removed because of political protests in Hong Kong when the 2019 conference was cancelled. Then, the restrictions that Covid-19 has placed on travel meant that the last two years’ conferences have had to be held on line. This was unfortunately no substitute for the pleasure of meeting people in the non-virtual world.

As I end my time with EPAT, I am pleased to hand the role to Andrew Madja who has worked hard with me to get up to speed on all aspects of the ME’s role. I am pleased to leave EPAT in such capable hands. I want to thank the support I have had over the years from Michael, from the PESA chair people, and the teams at T&F especially from the team in Melbourne, Nigel King and Alex Lazzari.

Also, my thanks go to all the authors and especially the reviewers whose efforts are voluntary and on whom the success of the journal depends. It has been a wonderful community to belong to and I am sad to say goodbye but do so with many happy memories. I wish you all the very best for the future.

Susanne Brighouse
[email protected]