Abstract
Academic research expresses and structures power (Espeland & Yung, 2019; Kirkland, 2019). Researchers make countless decisions about how to sample, collect data, and represent their findings. Reviewers, along with editorial teams, have the power to decide what constitutes new and needed knowledge and which research studies meet the threshold of “rigor.” Our editorial team thus approaches our role with a spirit of profound care and responsibility. We seek to push back against racism shrouded as rigor and narrow standards of quality that uphold racist, ableist, and other oppressive ways of knowing while sustaining RER’s formidable impact through pathbreaking research syntheses and field-shaping innovations.
The racial reckoning across professional organizations over the past several years (e.g., American Educational Research Association [AERA], 2020; American Psychological Association [APA], 2021; Council for Exceptional Children [CEC], 2020, Gordon & Rajagopalan, 2016) is pertinent to our vision—to continue to expand RER’s reach and ameliorate education inequities—given the historical context of measurement, assessment, and quantitative research methods that reify racial disparities across the field of education research. We encourage authors to consider critical methodological advances that signal a commitment to disrupting complex and intersecting educational inequities (e.g., systemic racism, ableism, classism) across the globe. We also intend to enhance the reach of RER’s articles to influence educational policy and practice in ways that center necessary attention on how and for whose benefit the research evidence is used. As such, one of our key aims is to invite scholars to contribute to scholarship that advances research syntheses in antiracist and other justice-centered ways.
As the established leader in field-synthesizing and field-defining reviews, the high quality of RER articles provides researchers with a comprehensive understanding of the state of knowledge that informs future research. Indeed, the high impact factor indicates the frequency with which researchers turn to and cite RER articles when crafting their own studies. In recent years, RER has also published three methodological guidance articles that describe in detail how to effectively design, execute, and communicate a systematic review. These articles—Alexander (2020), Pigott and Polanin (2020), and Wilson and Anagnostopoulos (2021)—have helped to demystify the process of designing, conducting, and writing up a systematic review of quantitative and qualitative literature. We aim to continue to clarify best practices in research syntheses that interrogate and interrupt epistemological hierarchies upholding social inequities. In doing so, we prioritize the alignment between the methods enacted to synthesize the literature and the range of methodologies employed in education research.
Expanding Perspectives While Building Upon Current Strengths
As coeditors, we come from different epistemological and methodological perspectives. As U.S.-based scholars, we interrogate our own sociocultural positioning in our research and scholarly praxis. We are four women with professional experiences across multiple regions in the United States that are reflected in our scholarship. Three coeditors are racialized as women of color. Boveda comes from South Florida and has familial ties to the Dominican Republic; Ford grew up in Guyana, England, and Vermont with origins tied to the Black and South Asian diasporas in the Caribbean; López spent her formative years in Mexico and the borderlands; and Frankenberg’s lived experiences as a racialized White woman in the U.S. South informs her scholarship focusing on racial desegregation. Each of us is an interdisciplinary researcher with interests in several areas of education that represent equity pedagogy, special education, teacher education, higher education, law, psychology, sociology, educational policy and politics, culture and language, assessment, as well as varied methodologies. We collectively bring editorial experience as former editors, associate editors, and our service on editorial boards of journals.
We work with an exceptional team of associate editors who complement and expand our own experiences and expertise. In addition, we are supported by a dynamic editorial board, who also have wide ranging areas of expertise that include critical indigenous curriculum and pedagogy; social justice issues in higher education and student affairs; digital equity; STEM and computer science equity and identity; parent involvement; sociological manifestations of expectations in the organization of classrooms, schools, and society; equitable and consequential science and engineering learning for historically underrepresented, minoritized youth; and critical race theory and mixed methods approaches. We anticipate expanding the views represented on the board as the scholarship we receive pushes us to consider the needs of the field.
We are cognizant of the ever-evolving needs of education and intend to sustain the journal’s excellence through expanding its reach. We thus signal an openness to welcoming broader topics and approaches as well as methodological diversity, and we will support sharing evidence from reviews to wider audiences. We aim to implement our vision by
Encouraging authors to read and cite studies outside of the generalist and field-wide journals, particularly international journals and those that are more specialized.
Requesting that authors explicitly address how their approaches assured citational justice and the efforts taken to consider scholarship generated by women, scholars of color, and other marginalized scholars in the methods section of the submission.
Encouraging authors to provide epistemological and/or positionality statements to frame their approach to the data, literature, and research question(s). These statements make space for authors to connect inquiry with their social identities, professional experiences, and research expertise (Boveda & Annamma, 2023). While this practice is more common in qualitative work (Murphy et al., 2020), it has been less present in quantitative work where researchers assume an objective stance implying that “the numbers speak for themselves” (Gillborn et al., 2018, p. 170). We strongly encourage all authors of syntheses, regardless of approach, to make their entry point into research inquiry explicit for our readers.
Inviting authors to consider urgent challenges related to evidence needed to promote equity in policy and practice (e.g., López, 2022). For example, in contexts like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, educators face increased scrutiny and political pressure to narrow curriculum as attacks on education equity increase. We welcome reviews that consider the needs of education advocacy, elevating the voices of families and educators of color, as well as syntheses that correct misinformation spreading about intersectionality, critical race theory, and other liberatory lenses.
Working with AERA staff and interested authors, we will expand efforts to share findings of recently published articles more widely. In doing so, we seek to widen the influence of RER, particularly heeding recent calls to enhance the synthesis of research to inform policymaking (Glied, 2022; National Academies, 2022). For example, a recent report about the future of education research at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) recommended more attention to research syntheses in addition to supporting research production.
Through our team of coeditors and associate editors, we intentionally sought to represent a wide scope of education research and praxis. It is our hope that the interdisciplinarity represented in our team will encourage submissions to build upon extant understandings of education, including what can be learned from other disciplines. We will examine our own practices, as well as data on submissions and the review process, with a goal that a wider diversity of authors consider RER as a potential home for their work on a more expansive array of topics within education research.
Traditionally, RER has covered teaching and learning topics. The ever-changing nature of education and society amid rapid demographic shifts are pushing education researchers to think about topics that expand beyond teaching and learning, inclusive of all levels and education contexts. Furthermore, societies’ growing attention to intersectional oppressions requires the field to think more explicitly about how educational contexts, policies, politics, and laws are implicated in the disparities that persist in schools and how research addresses or sustains disparities (Frankenberg, 2009).
For example, we discussed how our editorial vision should reflect the topics dominating the current moment in education research. Among them, “Big Data” are more readily available than ever before and offer the potential to provide sharper, more nuanced quantitative insights. Also, theorizing about social identities (race, gender, class, ability) calls on scholars to think explicitly about histories of power and oppression in their research design and analysis. These two areas of growth in education research may have emerged separately, but they are rapidly becoming relevant to one another, either colliding in perilous ways or creating new opportunities to examine important questions (Baker & Viano, 2022).
Data are not neutral. The identification, creation, and representation of data reflect hundreds of decisions about what to study; why; and how observations should be collected, measured, and categorized (see for example, Ford & Patterson, 2019). When constructing and analyzing datasets based on web scrapings, biomarkers, and recordings of classroom language use, researchers create thresholds, include and exclude observations, and interpret findings based on their lenses. We recognize the foundational differences between QuantCrit and CritQuant and invite work from both areas. QuantCrit scholars apply critical race theory to quantitative data (see, for example, Garcia & Mayorga, 2018), and quantitative criticalists (CritQuant) draw their scholarly genealogy from the conflict theory tradition of sociology that centers class struggle (see for example Stage, 2007). The methodological and empirical growth of these areas of research is underway in this moment and, as such, we have expanded the editorial team’s expertise in these areas, anticipating that submissions in these areas would allow RER to make contributions to education research.
Our society is amid major sociopolitical shifts that will affect education for the generations to come. As such, we expect that emerging research will help us understand the dynamic and interconnected effects of increased political polarization; the climate disaster; and the global pandemic on teachers, schools, families, communities, and learners. More broadly, the inquiry arising as a result of these issues might serve as an opportunity to better understand the connections between schools and other institutions that shape persisting inequities in teaching and learning (e.g., healthcare system, housing). We envision soliciting a broader examination of educational and societal crises and aim to work with authors to share findings from their published reviews to inform practice and policy.
Understanding the power enacted and sustained through the communication of research, we aim to expand RER’s reach and accessibility to broader audiences. This is of particular importance at a time in which research evidence is expanding, but syntheses used to inform policymaking, particularly examining different contexts, groups, and/or using qualitative methods, lag behind. We will not only work with AERA and authors to publicize published work on social media but will also be more intentional about summarizing findings to share with educational policymakers and practitioners. We believe that this will stimulate interest in the journal and position RER as the journal that offers preeminent syntheses for educational decision-making that reduces systemic inequities.
Maintain Influence While Expanding Equity, Excellence, and Access
As coeditors, we understand the role that RER has in shaping education research throughout the world. We are also, however, aware of the need to broaden the perspectives and contexts represented in the journal. A recent analysis shows that higher education journals are “dominated by research that is produced in the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK)” even when the journals claim to be international, which affords journals a higher level of prestige (Mason et al., 2021, p. 2). There are other similarly concerning studies pointing to the bias inherent in some prestigious outlets. An analysis of the most highly cited publications from the 2016 Education and Educational Research category in the Social Science Citation Index found that institutions, journals, and researchers coming from the United States were overwhelmingly the highest cited (Ivanović & Ho, 2019). Moreover, a recent study examining more than 26,000 articles in top-tier journals since the 1970s found that developmental psychology publications highlight race only 8% of the time, social psychology 5%, and cognitive psychology less than 1% (Roberts et al., 2020). In their inspection of some of the obstacles to more diverse representation, the authors identified editors and editorial boards as one of the key reasons journals are not as inclusive as they may otherwise aim to be. Indeed, many scholars opt to instead publish their work in journals that signal inclusiveness and equity as aims. Some scholars have even launched new journals to address this pervasive need (e.g., Padilla, 2013). We thus encourage RER reviewers and prospective authors who submit to our journal to consider and disrupt these problematic trends that marginalize underrepresented scholarship and maintain the status quo.
RER’s authors and content have shifted over the years in response to calls for greater emphasis on equity, innovations in the field, and educational topical needs. We envision that RER can both maintain its premier status among education research journals while expanding its audience, authors, and content to reflect a commitment to complex and intersecting equity concerns across diverse geographic and linguistic contexts in intentional and emancipatory ways.