Welcome to volume 18 of Research in Mathematics Education. Over the past 17 years, the journal has developed from a showcase of the work of members of the British Society for Research in Learning Mathematics (BSRLM) to a significant international journal. As the journal's popularity has grown, with a greatly increased number of submissions of research reports, the decision has been taken to increase the quality of the work we publish, rather than expand the number of issues. With this strategy and under the stewardship of successive editors, the journal has grown to be an outlet of some of the best research from around the world.
As a result, we have been planning a few changes which will appear over the course of this volume and which we hope will support its growth and reputation still further. First, we have reorganised our editorial board and international advisory board. The people on these boards are our core reviewing team, with every suitable submission normally going to at least one of this group of outstanding scholars, and this will not change. However, we felt that a journal publishing research from around the world no longer needed to distinguish between a UK-focused editorial board and international advisors. So we have merged the two bodies into one editorial board. We also see it as important to refresh the membership of the board and to do so in an open manner, so as some members of the boards have come to the end of their term of office, we advertised for new members and have been delighted with the response which has ensured that we can maintain the high standards of advice we get.
We have also decided to change the way in which we showcase the work of BSRLM. The link to our parent society is important and we had previously reflected this in Current Reports, highly compressed articles which were developed from presentations at BSRLM day conferences. However, submissions have been few, reflecting a very small proportion of the day conference activity, and the task of producing such compressed summaries was understandably difficult for many authors; Current Reports editors over the past few years have generously put in a large amount of effort to support their preparation for publication. To maintain the link to BSRLM and to better reflect the society's activity, we will instead be publishing the abstracts of the Informal Proceedings which follow the day conferences. Interested readers will then be able to access these proceedings online and get more detail of the work of society members than they had been able to from Current Reports. Our thanks go to all the Current Reports editors over the years, and particularly Cathy Smith, who we are delighted to say will now be joining the editorial board.
We will be maintaining our current practice of three issues a year: despite the increase in submissions to us, we believe the strategy for increasing quality rather than quantity is the right one. We also intend to maintain the pattern of two issues with general research reports and one special issue in each volume. We believe that it is right to use one issue in each volume to focus in depth on a topic of interest to the community and we encourage those interested in developing a special issue to contact us.
Finally, this issue sees the first of a series of occasional invited articles that we will commission from key researchers in mathematics education. We hope that these articles will be an opportunity for authors to develop novel and provocative arguments drawing on a body of research. In this first article, Julian Williams and Sophina Choudry develop Bourdieu's theory in order to suggest how critical educational research might usefully develop. Andy Noyes provides a response to Williams and Choudry.
We hope that readers will support the changes and that we will see the journal continue to contain the best empirical research and theoretical argumentation in mathematics education.