Abstract
We are honored and excited to be selected as the new incoming editorial team of Adult Education Quarterly. First, we would like to thank the outgoing team for their leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, their excellent work including international scholarship, and their focus on expanding the research methodologies and philosophical orientations in the journal. We hope to build upon this foundation while evolving the journal to reflect and respond to a range of contemporary issues impacting society and a changing world. We also would like to thank the AAACE Publications Committee for giving us this incredible opportunity to impact the field through developing scholars and scholarships that benefit the field of adult education and all those associated with it.
We are a team of five made up of Lisa R. Merriweather, the coordinating editor, three co-editors, Edith Gnanadass, Dianne Ramdeholl, Ralf St. Clair, and Jacob Frankovich, the Editorial Assistant.
Lisa Merriweather earned a PhD in Adult Education and a graduate certificate in Qualitative Research in 2004 from the University of Georgia. She is currently a professor of adult education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Since that time, she has been actively involved in the field, serving as a co-editor for the most recent edition of the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education, hosting the 2016 Adult Education Research Conference (AERC), and being a member of the AERC Steering Committee, the Executive Council Member at Large for the Commission of Professors of Adult Education, the New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education Advisory Board, and various editorial boards including the Adult Education Quarterly. She has edited three books and published book chapters and journal articles as well as presented widely primarily on topics related to racialization in adult education. Additionally, she co-founded Dialogues in Social Justice: An Adult Education Journal (DSJ) to provide a venue for elevating issues of equity and justice in adult education.
Edith Gnanadass has a PhD in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education and a minor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. She is currently an assistant professor of higher and adult Education at the University of Memphis. Using Critical Race Theory as an intervention into postcolonial feminist theory, her research is on race, racialization, and learning focusing currently on the racialized experiences of South Asian Americans. She is an active contributor to the field by currently serving on the executive boards of the Commission of Professors of Adult Education and the Adult Higher Education Alliance, serving as the co-editor of the upcoming Being Black in the United States themed issue of Dialogues in Social Justice: An Adult Education Journal, and serving on the Adult Learning editorial board.
Dianne Ramdeholl was a grassroots adult literacy practitioner for over 20 years before joining SUNY Empire State College (School for Graduate Studies) where she is currently a Professor in Adult Education. Committed to justice-centered practice and research, Dianne's work has been grounded in developing educational projects for/with marginalized populations. She has edited four volumes of New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education (Wiley) that focus on social/racial justice in adult education. She has served on AERC's steering committee and CPAE's executive committee. She is also the author of Adult Literacy in a New Era: Reflections from the Open Book (Paradigm, 2011), an oral history study of a Freirian-inspired adult literacy program in Brooklyn. Most recently she has authored, Confronting Institutionalized Racism in Higher Education: Counternarratives for Racial Justice (Routledge, 2022) which documents the struggles of racialized faculty across North America. Dianne is also the Co-Convener of the first Racialized Faculty Caucus at SUNY Empire State College.
Ralf St. Clair has been involved in the education of adults for almost 40 years, with an abiding interest in literacy and community-based learning. He currently lives and works on the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose territory the University of Victoria stands and acknowledges the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. Areas of specific interest include international and comparative education as well as research methods. During his career, he has served in a wide variety of service positions both within adult education and in the broader field of educational research, including 4 years as editor of Research Intelligence, the British Educational Research Association membership journal. St. Clair led the Scottish Adult Literacy Survey around a decade ago and presented an alternative analysis of the results that goes beyond viewing large proportions of the population as having a deficit. More recently, St. Clair has been writing on higher education, and trying to infiltrate adult education perspectives into formal educational structures. St. Clair published a book on teaching adults with Wiley in 2015 and is preparing to publish a guide to researching teaching and learning with adults with Stylus later in 2022.
Jacob Frankovich is currently a full-time doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the Ed.D. for Educational Leadership program, with a concentration in Higher Education. Jacob is most passionate about supporting positive social change, and he appreciates the avenue that higher education provides in developing change-driven, justice-minded leaders. Although Jacob is interested in all components of social justice and equity, he is planning research that will center on college students who are marginalized around their worldview, religious, spiritual, and secular identities. Before starting his doctoral program, Jacob worked in social justice education and residential life at Clemson University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Champlain College. Jacob received his Master's in Student Affairs Administration from Michigan State University and his bachelor's from Central Michigan University.
We see AEQ as a foremost venue for the representation of narratives and counter-narratives in our field. We are committed to making space for bodies of knowledge naming important truths about our field as it currently is, and what it has the potential to become. We believe that the journal has an important role in contributing and responding to conversations and conditions in communities, in the academy, on the streets, in programs, and in other spaces/places in the United States and internationally. We intend AEQ to reflect and amplify those conversations.
To reimagine the journal as a truth-telling project we invite scholars, activists, researchers, practitioners, and students to share their research and tell their truths. We particularly welcome underrepresented voices and perspectives in the hope of challenging dominant narratives that perpetuate existing inequities. At this time, to continue business as usual is to be complicit in denying the value of large sections of our society and the world. AEQ has an important role to play in this regard. Increased diversity is critical to justice and to the overall health of society. The voices of all communities need to be represented. Our editorial team embodies that work through our research, commitments, and practice and we bring all of who we are to this endeavor.
We have three overarching commitments. First, we believe it is important for AEQ to continue publishing work representative of its North American home. As editors we want AEQ to continue being the “go to” journal for adult education scholarship in all of North America, suggesting a need for more work centered in Mexico. We plan to continue promoting methodological and philosophical diversity in topics and research designs. Being attuned to trends in the scholarship previously published while having a plan of action for broadening representation will grow the scope of AEQ in positive ways.
Second, we see opportunities to build relationships and dialogue with voices beyond North America. There are critically important viewpoints and insights with the potential to richen and deepen the conversation in important ways. We will continue to expand international scholarship in AEQ. We see an opportunity to reflect scholarship of scholars from the Global South more substantially, particularly those who would be considered Black or Brown. We see this as the next necessary step in fulfilling the journal's commitment to internationalization. Under our editorship, we hope to expand the representation of non-Western scholars.
Third, one of our core commitments as an editorial team is the idea of equity and excellence as mutually reinforcing values within the academic enterprise. It is important to counter challenges to civil and human rights, Critical Race Theory, and affirmative action. We view this journal as pivotal in making space for perspectives and individuals that will speak to these issues.
We believe producing a journal that is inclusive, equitable, and excellent requires intentionality, carefully curating issues attracting the strong scholarship that frequently appears in the journal and the strong scholarship that less frequently appears. We invite manuscripts from all authors who are interested in helping position AEQ as a journal that privileges the work of those contributing to equity, diversity, and inclusion. We have a place for you here.