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Editorial

Volume 38, Number 1, Spring 2006

What do we mean by quality?
Miriam Zukas, University of Leeds, UK (m.zukas@leeds.ac.uk)

What criteria do we use to judge the quality of a journal like Studies? And why should we be trying to make that assessment? As Editor, I am sometimes asked by colleagues who have published in Studies, or are considering submitting a paper to the journal: what is the impact or quality of our journal? Predictably my response is to ask “what do you mean by impact?” Replies usually include requests for “measures” such as the journal’s rejection rate, or its ranking in citation indices, or indices of internationalisation. Often, colleagues enquire about impact because the information is required by promotion panels to “measure” the status of publications, or because authors are trying to judge how to maximise the “impact” of their own work, perhaps because of some kind of quality audit of research in their own organisation or country.

Such questions cannot be ignored by editorial boards, even if we are somewhat sceptical. First, we want to be able to publish the best work we can; authors have a choice about where to submit their work and judgements about “impact” may be important in deciding whether or not to submit to a particular journal. And second, journals are increasingly implicated in the various national attempts to rationalize scarce resources for research. So, for example, academics participating in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK have been much exercised by the possible use of “metrics,” including citations and journal ranking, as a proxy for the “objective” measure of the quality of research. And this is not just a British problem: many countries are preparing for or running their own versions of research assessment, with some electing to “count” publications only if they appear in journals included in citation indexes, and others preparing to “rank” journals in some way or other.

Of course, the relations between journal “impact” and measurements such as citation and ranking vary from discipline to discipline, or even within disciplines. In education, for example, only ninety of the seven hundred or more journals are listed by the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) so it could be argued that such indices are, at best, partial and, at worst, downright misleading. But that does not prevent some countries using the SSCI as an indicator of quality or algorithm of “impact.” So what does this mean in education? A recent email survey of professors of education in the UK and the USA showed that, first, there was limited consensus of the indicators of high status; and second, when asked to name four journals in their field which they considered high status, there was barely any agreement between respondents (Wellington and Torgerson, 2005). The indicators of status included: entry criteria, such as difficulty of being published; the referee process; standing of editors, editorial board, publisher and contributors; readership and citations; and, of course, content. But, as with the naming of high status journals, there was little general consensus about these indicators.

Perhaps one of the more interesting findings related to the comparison between UK and US respondents; those in the USA appeared to be more concerned with entry criteria, while those in the UK were more concerned about signs of internationalisation, whether in readership, authors or through the refereeing process. This fits with the pattern of enquiries I receive.

So where does this leave Studies? We believe that there are different ways of understanding better what is being read in the journal, who is reading the journal, and the level of influence of the published papers. For example, at each Board meeting, NIACE, our publisher, provides us with fascinating data about the number of times each paper is downloaded; in another editorial, I will reveal some of the most popular pieces since we went online.

Our figures also provide us with data about the locations of those downloading so that we know, for instance, that we have an avid reader – or several – in a small territory of New Zealand. Thus we have a better sense of whether or not we have an international readership than we would through subscription data, although we are sometimes left with unresolved puzzles as to why a particular organisation should be downloading hundreds of papers.

We could also use Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) to give a rough indication of the articles which have been cited most frequently in electronically available material, although of course Scholar has many limitations. But all these indicators say little about the actual quality of the papers or the research informing the production of these texts. In the end, that is a matter of judgement, as is so much of the process of refereeing and editing. The British Education RAE panel members have recognised this by saying that they will not use the location of publication or citations or any other proxies to make judgements about the quality of research; they plan instead to read every piece submitted to them – just as our referees do – and use this to make a decision.

And so to this issue. We are delighted to be publishing papers from six countries (Australia, Canada, England, Germany, USA and Scotland). Tara Fenwick’s article, “The audacity of hope: Towards poorer pedagogies”, explores critically a number of popular discourses of pedagogy in adult education theory and practice – pedagogy as person, as prescriptive strategy, as political purpose and as situated practices. She suggests that these are controlling and disciplining discourses infused with moral essentialism and, drawing on complexity theory and more ecological accounts, argues instead for more open and compassionate orientations. These should result in what she calls “poorer” pedagogies for adult education – that is, they should be more local and contingent, taking account of ethical and ecological relations in pedagogy.

The significance of context signalled by Fenwick and many others, particularly from activity theory and situated learning perspectives, is examined by Richard Edwards in relation to the notion of lifelong learning. His speculative paper, “Beyond the moorland? Conceptualising lifelong learning”, asks us engage critically with the taken-for-granted, invisible but ubiquitous notion of a learning context. As he outlines, the discussion about context has been taking place elsewhere in the literature on situated learning, but the connections between these debates and lifelong learning have not been made. He therefore suggests that we need a relational (rather than an “envelope”) understanding of context, so that we understand contexts to be performed through practices. He develops these ideas to explore what happens to the psychological notion of “transfer” – that is, learning which “moves” from one context to another – when we adopt a relational understanding. And he raises some important questions for lifelong learning researchers – how do we conceptualise contexts for lifelong learning? What are the relationships between learning in different practices? What forms of pedagogy can most effectively mobilise learning across practices and for what purposes?

Heidrun Herzberg’s paper, “Learning Habitus and the Dynamics of Lifelong Learning”, is also concerned with context, although in this case we understand context as social framing. In order to understand the influence of social frame on both continuity and change in learning, Herzberg reports on an intergenerational study of parents and children working in the shipbuilding industry in Rostock. Her work raises a number of problems with Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and, in order to respond to these, she offers the concept of biographical learning habitus.

Jenny Sandlin and George Bey report on research with archaeologists working in the Yucatan in Mexico to try and create an archaeology that is less damaging to local environments, cultural resources and local communities than many archaeological projects. Like Herzberg, their work also tries to link individual and social change, although they work with a much more restricted time frame. However, in contrast to Herzberg, the theoretical resources at play here include Giddens’ structuration theory as well an expanded notion of critical transformation.

We return to issues of context and space with Donna Rooney and Nicky Solomon’s development of the observation that many learning/work spaces involve consumption – that is, they take place alongside eating and drinking. While many of us can attest to the significance of the water cooler or coffee machine as a site for learning, in somewhat playful mode, they develop the metaphor of learning as consuming in order to produce new understandings of everyday learning. Of course, there are dangers of such a metaphor in relation to the possible foregrounding of the commodification of education and the passive consumption of knowledge; but these dangers are, they suggest, avoidable if we understand consuming and learning as everyday, pleasurable, productive and necessary.

Food comes up again in our final paper, “Jam, Jerusalem and Calendar Girls”, by Sue Jackson. Her title draws on the imagery associated with the Women’s Institute (WI) in England – that of “respectable femininity”, social class and “Englishness”. Her study focuses on women learners (generally over 50) who participate in programmes at Denman College, the Federation of Women’s Institutes’ residential college. She uses their accounts and an exploration of the curriculum to examine this unusual women only learning space from the perspective of active citizenship and social capital, but concludes that, although there is evidence of more engagement with citizenship issues and the development of social capital, there is little to indicate that learning goes beyond the company of “like-minded people”.

Both Herzberg’s and Jackson’s studies are – unusually – concerned with generational issues but the Editorial Board hopes to generate a broader discussion in this arena. We are republishing details of how to contribute to our first symposium on Learning Through The Lifecourse: Connecting Identity, Agency And Structure, coordinated by one of our Board members, Kathryn Ecclestone from the University of Nottingham. This has been an ongoing theme in a well-resourced series of educational research projects in the UK, and we welcome all contributions, in line with the timetable spelled out in our call.

Finally, we are also republishing our call for symposia, to remind our readers that we are actively seeking proposals for symposia on specific themes of interest to scholars and researchers in this area. Usually symposia will consist of four to five papers on a particular theme, and proposals could be made by individuals or groups of individuals, provided one person is identified as the lead proposer. Further details can be found in this edition and on our website.

References
Wellington, J. and Torgerson, C.J. (2005) ‘Writing for publication: what counts as a “high status, eminent academic journal”?’, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 29(1), pp. 35–48.