Abstract
As a new (2019) member of Management in Education’s International Advisory Board, my short reflective essay for its 50th anniversary is shaped both by a newcomer’s enthusiasm for the journal’s potential and by my inevitably limited knowledge of the publication’s history and trajectory. My purpose here is to share a little bit about what attracted me to the journal, where I think the journal sits in the larger educational leadership and management (EDLM) publishing landscape and what questions or principles could help guide the journal’s future.
I am a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Toronto. My recent work, including as guest editor of an issue of BELMAS sibling journal Educational Management Administration and Leadership, examines school-level leadership in comparative context: How similar or different is being a school head in England versus a principal in Canada versus a director/a in Chile? We know context matters, but how does it matter for school-level administration, and how should policymakers or researchers interpret the relevance or application of research findings from one context to their own? The field of comparative educational administration, as articulated by Dimmock and Walker (1998), is more relevant now than ever in our increasingly networked and racially, culturally, regionally, and socioeconomically stratified globe. Insofar as Management in Education is able to broaden our field’s collective understanding of whether/how much school management can be a tool for building more just and equitable schools and education systems – while also asking whether school management might actually be the process that helps sustain inequality and unfairness – the journal is occupying an important space in the EDLM universe. As a reader and reviewer of research for MIE I perceive an openness to publishing international work. One question is whether that international work is in fact explicitly comparative, or if the comparative analysis is left to the reader to do. Another question is whether work published in MIE tackles fundamental questions about educational opportunity and equity, or whether its tendency is to foreground technocratic findings over considerations of what schools can be or should be.
To be frank, I had never heard of MIE prior to my attendance at my first SAGE publishing awards reception at my first BELMAS conference in 2017. I wonder why that is? My North American research training and professional location have undoubtedly constrained my grasp of global EDLM publishing, but it’s also equally possible that the journal’s own approach to knowledge mobilization played a role. As an academic whose research and teaching both attempt to illustrate that rigorous, systematic inquiry into education and mundane, practical utility to day-to-day educators are not opposites, and as someone whose response to the growing mountain of school leadership literature has been occasionally to wonder ‘what’s so wrong with management?’ a journal like MIE should have been on my radar many years ago but wasn’t.
This brings me to my sense of where the journal could grow and develop in the next decades. I see great potential for the journal to connect more explicitly with EdD programmes, both as a resource for courses and student literature reviews and as a publishing venue for students who have completed their EdD research. The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) has convened an academic and professional community and publishes its own journal, Impacting Education: Journal for Transforming Professional Practice. There is no rule, however, that their journal need be the only outlet for fine-grained research into problems of practice important to educators. In fact, MIE could provide greater international exposure to projects concerned with education management than the mostly-US emphasis of CPED.
However, for this to be a viable path forward the journal has to make its theory-to-practice and practice-to-theory commitments more visible. I am asking myself whether MIE does, in fact, have relevance to practice. And if it does not, how it could. One question to consider is whether the reviewers the journal relies upon are able to fairly represent and provide feedback anchored to the concerns of practitioners. Article reviewing is crucial for quality control but it’s also the most obvious gatekeeping exercise in publishing. How many of the ‘peers’ in our peer review process are oriented towards the field rather than towards academia?(This isn’t a rhetorical question!) I am wondering whether MIE can demonstrate, concretely, its commitment to practice in this way. (I don’t know that answer!) Reviewing is volunteer labour, sometime thankless; how do we encourage and reward the input of educators outside of academia in our attempt to build linkages between research and practice? How we manage these relationships will illustrate our actual, rather than aspired-to, commitments.