Aim and Scope

Call for Papers

The Berkeley Review of Education (BRE) encourages senior and emerging scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers to submit articles that address issues of educational diversity and equity from various intra/interdisciplinary perspectives. The editorial board especially welcomes submission of manuscripts that engage with one or more of our Board Priorities:

• Pressing Issues. The BRE seeks to publish papers that address compelling issues impacting schools, educational systems, and other learning environments.
• Critical Scholarship.The BRE welcomes a broad range of “critical” scholarship, particularly work that analyzes, evaluates, and problematizes power and dominant structures, and helps us to imagine something new.
• Pushing Borders and Boundaries. The BRE seeks to promote scholarship that re-conceptualizes and transcends academic identities, labels, and categories. We encourage work from all disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary work that builds towards new understandings of educational processes and practices.
• Forging Communities. The BRE seeks to foster new and existing relationships within and beyond the academy. As an open-access journal, we aim to democratize knowledge and encourage work that originates from and speaks to a wide range of scholars, practitioners, activists, and educators.

We are currently accepting submissions on a rolling basis for articles to be published for our spring 2018 and fall 2018 issues. 

Aims

Understanding issues of diversity and equity to be central, yet highly contested, themes in educational research, the BRE seeks to foster critical awareness and analysis of these issues in educational processes and practices. We offer the following guiding frameworks in order to support an ongoing dialogue about the complexities of these issues.

Diversity

In the field of education, "diversity" has come to mean many things, ranging from cultural and cognitive heterogeneity in learning contexts, to the hybridity inherent in all social settings, to the diverse paths of cognitive, social, and developmental processes.

The BRE welcomes manuscripts that approach "diversity" from a range of different vantage points. The journal publishes articles that frame educational settings and systems as tensile zones of contact, where the meanings of "diversity" are constructed and where its value is both asserted and contested. Additionally, the journal publishes articles that address how individuals and groups with diverse affiliations interact and co-engage within both learning contexts and developmental processes.

Finally, the BRE aims to be representative of the diverse scholarship and interests of the educational research community, as well as of the diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to studying learning, development, education, and policy.

Equity

Like "diversity," "equity" has been a continually negotiated and contested term in education. Research on educational equity, as both a process and as an outcome, has highlighted the social biases, both historical and contemporary, that affect educational stakeholders. Research on educational equity has explored social biases within educational policies, processes, and practices, and has also looked at the roles that education has played in addressing social biases within society.

The BRE publishes manuscripts that contribute to an evolving discussion of how educational access, quality, achievement, diversity, social justice, and reform efforts influence the educational enterprise. The BRE likewise welcomes submissions that both posit and/or problematize the transformative potential of education as it is situated within a broader social context.

Scope & Interdisciplinary approaches

The Berkeley Review of Education is committed to the notion that interdisciplinary scholarship has the potential to advance understanding of educational phenomena. Recognizing that educational issues are complex and multidimensional, the BRE seeks to capitalize on the theoretical and empirical contributions of scholars from diverse fields and disciplines who address issues of educational diversity and equity in and out of school settings.

To that end, the BRE encourages submissions that foster critical communication spanning a broad range of disciplines including, but not limited to, anthropology, cultural studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, information studies, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and women’s studies. We encourage the collaboration across disciplines and frameworks to highlight the role of language and literacy in the sociocultural and political contexts of education, the interplay among cognitive, social, and developmental processes in human knowledge and experience, and the role of policy within schools and the broader sociopolitical context. We further encourage submissions that re-imagine what a critical approach to education might look like from within and between traditional and alternative theoretical paradigms entailed in the multiple disciplines.