We welcome submissions from practitioners who are undertaking to understand and explain their educational influences in their own learning, the learning of others, and in their own contexts. We are keen to publish accounts in which practitioners show how they are living their values in their working lives. Indeed one of the reasons for our existence is to give the space, freedom and encouragement to speak to people who may not have been able to, or have wanted to, or felt the relevance of writing and representing - their vast and important ideas and knowledge before. Although we prefer practitioners' accounts, we are open to different forms of expression from contributors who stand firmly in their lives for the life-affirming values that help others and make the world a better place for all peoples.

Video guidelines

Background: We accept Kilpatrick's (1951) premise that educational research may have profound implications for the future of humanity. We see the establishment of this e-journal as one small step towards the shared good of our humanity. There are several excellent international Action Research journals already in existence and our journal is not seeking competition with them. However, we are looking for something distinctive, which we don't believe exists elsewhere. In seeking something new, we are hoping to offer stimulating avenues for creativity, learning and furthering our educational influences.

EJOLTS is committed to:

• Ongoing discussions of Living Theorists about their work (www.ejolts.net/moodle). We understand Living Theories to be in the process of comprehending and explaining the open-ended nature of their enquiries as they seek to improve learning within their own particular contexts and relate it to the wider picture.
• Publishing explanations that connect a flow of life-affirming energy with living values such as love, freedom, justice, compassion, courage, care and democratic evaluation.
• Flexibility of forms, processes and explanations. As an entirely web-based journal we feel there are advantages to other publications that rely mainly on hard copy. We understand that unproblematic definitions of practice and theory, as well as generalisations, lie outside our scope, therefore we can use the internet to integrate as many forms as possible in order to give life to what it is we want to communicate. By this we mean the written word, in conjunction with multi-media forms, including for example, audio, visual, videoing, and photographs.
• Originality and creativity in forms and processes that reflect the real lived experiences of authors. We aim to bring the authors and readers/audience closer to what actually happens when we seek to influence ourselves and others educationally. We understand that Living Theorists' work is in a process of becoming but that this doesn't lessen the requirement to rigorous accountability in the pursuit of knowledge, theory and improvements in practice.

Specific Guidelines for Submission:

Writing: We would like you to offer a clearly written description and explanation in English^* of your context(s), purposes, processes and outcomes of your enquiry, between about 6000 - 12,000 words. We recognise that Living Theories do not tend to fit neatly into pre-sized packages, so we will be very flexible about this! However, we feel the need to impose some guidelines on the length of the submissions. Texts can be submitted in MS Word or html. During the reviewing process it can be adjusted to the standard form of our journal - i.e. html for web publishing and pdf for printing purposes.

Title, Name, Summary, Abstract, Keywords: The full title and your name should appear at the beginning of the account. A summary or abstract should then be included, in order to help the reader focus on the main processes of your enquiry. This should be followed by the keywords, by which your account can then be classified and cross-referenced.

Clarity of Expression: We would like accounts to be as jargon-free as possible and expressed in ways which will be comprehensible to as wide an audience as possible. We would like it if technical terms were explained clearly as you went along. For writers whose first language is not English, members of the editorial board are willing to help in the linguistic clarification of particular concepts highlighted by the author(s).

Bibliography/References: We expect a fully-referenced account and accept references/bibliographies, giving a uniform presentation of author(s), date, title, place of publication, country and/or url. Titles of hard-copy journals should be italicized to make identification easier and include volume and page-numbers.

Please Note:
If appropriate and possible your accounts are encouraged to integrate any useful urls to:

• Other papers you have referenced in some way - in html, Word, pdf formats;
• Photographs that help us to see more of what you mean - in jpeg format;
• Videos demonstrations of practice (which could include classrooms, places of work, meetings, one-to-one work, additional material, and so on) - in e.g. Youtube (FLV), Windows Media Video (WMV) format, QuickTime (MOV) format, RealVideo (RM or RAM) format etc.;
• Graphical illustrations (i.e. graphs, flow-charts, etc.)
• Representational artwork, or mp3 audio/music links, which might help in some way to strengthen the explanations you are giving.

We recognise that different workplaces and geographical locations have access to different resources, so we will not penalise contributors who are not able to make use of hi-tech equipment. We simply want to emphasise our openness to multiple forms of representation in terms of descriptions and explanations of practice.

Ethical/Copyright Considerations: We believe it is important to emphasise that the editorial group is not responsible for copyrights and any ethical consequences of the publication of any particular contribution (written or in the form of multimedia). However, we expect that all people providing sources of data for published accounts have given their informed consent and that no one in any way involved in the processes of the research has been coerced into co-operation or is unknowingly being co-opted. It is also to be expected that the contributions of individuals and groups and affiliations are acknowledged by the author(s).

Publications: We aim to publish our journal three times a year.


Submissions: Please send your submission to editorial by using e-submission form (see the guidelines). You will then quickly receive notification of its receipt and a timeline of the processes of review.

References:

Kilpatrick, W. (1951). Crucial issues in current educational theory. Educational Theory. 1(1), 1-8.

 

Please read the complete guidelines for paper submissions!