Pedagogy, Culture & Society Audio Interview with Carrie Paechter, Editor Goldsmith s University, 18 November, 2010 Interview transcript 1. How would you describe Pedagogy, Culture & Society and what are its aims and scopes? Pedagogy, Culture and Society is a journal that is about pedagogy, but not pedagogy as it is generally understood in English, but pedagogik as it is understood very much in Europe and in Germany and Scandinavia, so it is really about all aspects of learning and education including how people learn, what people learn, what the curriculum contains, the context of education, and that includes formal and informal education and all sorts of aspects of life-long learning. So we re really interested in anything that is about learning situations. 2. What is the range of issues and concerns that the journal aims to explore? Again, the journal is really very eclectic; that s because pedagogy is eclectic, it is an eclectic field so we re interested in all the different ways in which learning takes place and the context in which learning takes place. What that means is that we re interested in the social context of education, the psychological or neurological context of education. We re interested in the construction of curriculum, we re interested in the philosophical ideas behind it, we re interested in what happens in learning organisations or learning institutions such as schools or work places or the family. It s really a very eclectic journal because it s a very eclectic field. 3. What do you think are the most contentious issues in contemporary debate and research in education which your journal seeks to address? I think different issues are differently contentious in different places, and so there isn t one contentious issue or one group of contentious issues that we re addressing because what issues matter depend on the context. And so for example in the UK there is still some contention around National Curricula and what should go in to the National Curriculum, but that is not something that is contentious in Scandinavia, for example. In other countries there are whole issues about how much of the nation s history or the nation s national culture would go into the curriculum. In other places, assessment; in the UK, assessment is a big issue still, so it really does depend on where you are as to what is contentious, and as we are very much an international journal, where you are needs to be identified and explained when people are writing, but the international-ness of the journal also means that we don t focus on any particular issues, because there aren t, I don t think, any particularly world-wide issues in pedagogy.
4. Who do you feel are your readership, your core audience? Our core audience is, again, very eclectic, it is people who are interested in different aspects of education. I don t think many people read the entire journal, but I think most people who come across the journal will find something that is interesting to them in it, and I think that s a better way of looking at it. So, our core readership is extremely international, we have subscriptions from all over the world, we have authors from all over the world, and it s mainly people who are interested in either theorising about education and pedagogy and curriculum and assessment, or people who are interested in how we understand all those things in various ways, particularly through the social and through the cultural. 5. What do you look for when considering articles and submissions? Primarily we look for something that is well written and rigorous, and very well thought through so that the argument is very clear, but also that is fully understandable to an international audience. So it s very important that pieces are explained in such a way that an international audience can understand them. Now that doesn t mean that you can t write about things that are going on in your bit of the world, but what it means is that you have to explain the assumptions of your bit of the world for your readers. 6. How do you spot a good article? A good article is one that makes you want to carry on reading it. It s one that you can see clearly what is going on, so that it s well signposted. You can see where the argument is going and you can address it easily. A good article is not too long; I think once you ve got over 8,000 words an article is getting a bit too long. But I think the most important thing is that it s readable, it is engaging and that the argument is clear, and that is has something new to say. 7. What are the most common mistakes? Probably the most common mistake is to be parochial, and that comes particularly from the Englishspeaking West, Americans, and British, and to a lesser extent Australians, but it s a particular problem with the Americans and the Brits will write as if everyone knew their what their national or even state educational system was like and understood all the acronyms and all the organisations that were involved. So people write the Government believes... rather than the Government in England and Wales... or the Government in Finland believes... and they won t necessarily explain properly what the background is so it s very important for people to give a clear background, a national background or a local background to the issue that they re addressing, otherwise the reader really doesn t know where they are and they lose interest. I think related to that, it is quite common for people not to draw out the international implications for what they are trying to talk about, so that s extremely important, otherwise a paper has no place in an international journal.
The other thing people tend to do is to go on for too long and to waffle. It never hurts an author to read what they think is the final draft and cut it by 10%, so we re looking very much for conciseness and for clarity of argument. And the other thing that people often do, particularly if they re relatively new to academic writing, is they tend to try and be too clever, and they fill up their pages with references and erudite footnotes, which really just make it difficult to read. I think the other thing, and there are a lot of things people can do wrong, footnotes are a real problem; we have a no footnote policy now that doesn t mean we really have no footnotes, but we have as minimal number as possible. It s a very common mistake for people new to academic writing, or for people who have been doing it for longer but are a bit pompous, to put in footnote after footnote after footnote and what happens is that even if it gets through the refereeing process, they go when we get to putting the copy together because the compiling editor will edit them out. We think if something is worth saying, it s worth putting in the main text; if it doesn t fit in the main text, unless it s something very basic like the age of children in a particular year group in a school or in a locality, or the sort of thing you sometimes have to put in like references to your funding agency, we don t want it in there, it belongs in the text. One thing that people frequently do when they are writing papers is they dream up weird and wonderful titles. The trouble with weird and wonderful titles is that it doesn t get picked up by search engines, or if it does get picked up by a search engine searching for the wrong thing so you need to either have a title or a subtitle that is very, very explicit about what you are trying to say. You can a have a lovely title so long as the subtitle is very, very clear, that way you will get readership. We do tend to advise authors as part of the refereeing process if we think that the titles are problematic but we do think that they are important. For example, we have one current title which is Numberjacks are on their way. Now that s a lovely title but it doesn t mean anything in terms of what happens in a search engine, but it has a subtitle which is A cultural historical reflection on contemporary society and the early childhood curriculum. Now that will be picked up very nicely by a search engine and even Numberjacks will get picked up by number. We have there a nice title which reflects what the author wants to say but a subtitle which allows the paper to be found easily, and that s the pattern that we would encourage. 8. What advice would you give researchers who would like to be published in your journal? Write concisely, think about your audience will this make sense to somebody in Brazil? Will this make sense to somebody in Finland? Will it make sense to somebody in Australia? So think about who your audience are and think about what you re going to say and make sure your argument is very clear, so be very clear about that you re trying to say. If you re reporting empirical work, we need to know how you did it, we need to know the numbers of people that you interviewed or whatever, we need to know the circumstances of the work. The other thing is to write in as competent English as you can; if you aren t a native speaker, get a native speaker to read it through; it s always worth getting somebody to read it through anyway, but get a native speaker to read it through. That said, we can give support to non-native speakers in tidying up their English. We have a system whereby once an article has been accepted it then goes
to a compiling editor who does a real editing job, and in some cases the compiling editor will work with the author to make absolutely clear what they are trying to say in English. We also, if we really think an article is worth publishing, and there are problems with the English, we can actually get somebody to work with you for a while. Now that doesn t mean we re prepared to translate because we don t, and we can t referee pieces that aren t in English or aren t in good enough English for us to be able to referee them, but it does mean that we can tidy up infelicities where we need to and help people express themselves better. 9. What are your aspirations for the future of the journal? I think we want to develop the journal s global reach even further. We are doing very well at the moment in terms of who reads it and also who publishes in it, so for example the latest issue has authors from Scandinavia, from the UK, from the Far East and from Australia. Now that s a pretty good reach but we would like to have more people from the Far East and more people from South America and from Southern Europe. We do better in Northern Europe than we do in Southern Europe at the moment, so I think the main thing for us would be really developing the international focus and the range of articles. Philosophical pieces, yes, I don t think that comes in there but I do need to say it somewhere, that we do really welcome philosophical writing. 10. Pedagogy debate is culturally diverse: in what ways does Pedagogy, Culture & Society support this? We support the cultural diversity of pedagogic debate really by being very explicit about how we want people to explain their cultural background, explain their cultural assumptions or the cultural assumptions of the situations that they re writing about. So we, for example, are very encouraging of writing in curriculum history, which unpacks cultural underpinnings of particular ways of thinking about the world or particular ways of learning and teaching. We, as I ve said, really encourage a very wide international group of people to submit. We take a lot of trouble to ensure that we have editorial board members from a very diverse range of countries. We do have people from all over the world, people who are native speakers and non-native speakers of English and who have particular expertise often in cultural understandings and different ways of thinking about education. So, although the editorial executive, the core team, is based in the UK, we very much see ourselves as part of a wider educational community, and we do reckon to have most of our submissions refereed by people from all over the world, and not just the community from which the pieces arrive, and that s very important to us I think. 11. What significant curriculum developments have there been over recent years which have had a direct impact on the direction of the journal? I think there have certainly been more pieces in the last few years which deal with equity issues within education, but I think it s more not what s gone on in the curriculum that has changed the
journal, but the way thinking about curriculum, and thinking about learning and teaching is changing internationally does influence the way the journal is moving. We have always been a very philosophical, we still reckon to have a lot of philosophical pieces, but I think we re getting them from a wider range of places now which I think is very important because it allows us to take on board different ways of thinking about the curriculum and the ways they are changing. There are some ways of thinking about education which are relatively new which we are very much involved with. We have done a lot of work within the journal on space and place within education. We had a special edition on space and identity and we continue to have a lot of work on the way education is spacialised. The other big issue of course is new technologies in education and they influence all journals of this sort, so we are clearly taking pieces like that, pieces that discuss how new technologies are affecting education. I think the other thing is that there is a much stronger emphasis now internationally and within the journal on lifelong learning, so we have a much stronger lifelong learning strand than we used to. We used to be much more school focussed and we re not now, and that s lifelong learning both within and outside of institutions, and we re beginning to have more stuff on the family and the importance of the family in education which again is a trend within the field. 12. What topics would you like to see more of to represent the way that the journal has changed? I think I d like to see more papers from the Middle East, and the Far East, and from the Indian Subcontinent, and probably more papers from Africa. We get some papers from Africa but they tend to be from South Africa or from Zimbabwe, we don t get much from the rest of Africa and it would be nice to have a lot more from there, and a few more from South America would be good. So I think developing the international reach further, maybe getting further into countries such as France and Germany where people are less likely to publish in English would be important. We have recently accepted a French paper about the French curriculum which is a curriculum history paper which I think is important. I d like to see more on curriculum history because I think it has important things to say about curriculum today, and more about national and global equities and issues of equity within different situations and circumstances. I think also we do see the culture part of Pedagogy, Culture & Society as very central and I think that can be developed more, it would be nice to see more papers that take that very seriously, and also to continue the strand of having seriously philosophical papers. Pedagogy, Culture & Society is one place you can send work that isn t empirical, that is about thinking about pedagogy, thinking about education, and some of our most exciting pieces have been in those areas so I think that s important. 13. What do you think is the most important and/or controversial subject in contemporary debate that has been discussed and considered through the journal?
As I said earlier, what is contentious and what is controversial varies from location to location so we have different papers from different places that tackle different subjects. I don t think there is any one that we could say is the important issue. I think what we get is a reflection on what is important in different locations, different controversies are set against each other within the journal so you get a reflection on what is controversial in parts of the world and how those controversies link with each other rather than saying this is an international big debating point because generally there isn t. There are big debates about whether there should be a national curricula or not, but even when you have a national curriculum, a national curriculum in one area or one state is so different from the national curricula in another state that it s difficult to really have a sense that that s a big debate. 14. In what ways does your journal encourage and facilitate open discussion? I think the most important thing about the journal is it s openness to different sorts of papers and different sorts of things. We don t have any preconceptions about what works in the journal. It s quite unusual to turn a paper down for not being suitable for the journal if it s a good paper, apart from that it does happen occasionally. Occasionally you get papers submitted that would be great but aren t about education. Generally we are trying to publish interesting things about pedagogy and education and how they are linked and that aim, I think, and what results from that is probably the best way that we facilitate discussion. Supporting people in publishing from all over the world, supporting people in publishing when they are not used to writing in English, those are the most important things that we do. 15. Pedagogy, Culture & Society publishes Special Issues; how do you feel these fit into the journal s ethos of variety and internationality, and how would you propose a themed issue? It is very much a journal that you can dip in and out of. I don t, as the Editor, find every paper fascinating in each issue and I don t suppose anybody else on the Editorial Board or Editorial Executive does. But there s always a paper in an issue that you want to read and I think from the point of view of the reader now who isn t likely to be subscribing as an individual and picking up a whole issue and reading it, what you need to be able to do is to look in and say what is there is in here that is of interest to me? and I think most people working in education in one way or another will find something that is interesting to them within the journal. They ll find it by looking online, possibly searching rather than picking up a whole copy, unless it is a Special Issue. The Special Issues really do work as entities. There is a Special Issue every year and the Special Issues generally are very coherent. We have a Special Issue most years. They are on a great variety of topics. They quite often arise out of seminars we ve organised because we also sponsor seminars. I think they are different from the rest of the journal because they are very coherent, the Special Issues will have a coherent theme and an international group of people discussing that theme and we work quite hard to make our Special Issues something that is at the cutting edge of what s going on in the field as a whole. So I think
people do read whole Special Issues but I think apart from that it is very much a dip in and out of journal. We do welcome proposals for Special Issues. If you want to produce a Special Issue you need to think about a number of things. You need to think very much about the topic and whether it s a really important and current topic. You need to think about the sort of angle you would have on the topic, we want something that is unusual and arresting I think for our Special Issues. The other thing is that you need to think about where you are going to get your contributors from, because we really only want Special Issues that are truly international. So in keeping with the rest of the journal a Special Issue has to have contributors from at least two or three countries and different sorts of educational systems so that we get different perspectives on the particular issue under consideration. If you are putting together a Special Issue we have member of the Editorial Executive that will work closely with you. We give a lot of support to Special Issue Editors but we do have fairly strong expectations of them in terms of peer review, in terms of international-ness of the issue, and in terms of its coherence. Editors of Special Issues sometimes work within ScholarOne and sometimes don t, and we negotiate that with them. It s usually better if they work within it so that we can see what is going on but that doesn t always work for them. So long as we are confident that their peer review processes are strong then we are happy, and that s a matter for their situation working with our Special Issues Editor and liaising with him about how they do things.