CJEAP: Ten Years Old
By Kelvin Seifert, Editor
and Karen Poetker, Assistant Editor

As of May, 2005, the Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy will be ten years old. Enough time has passed to point to some real growth and accomplishments. Since publishing its first issue (Ben Levin, “Reforming Secondary Education,” May, 1995), the journal has published 35 issues, though since two of these have multiple parts, CJEAP has actually published 54 articles. If printed, the material would fill about 1400-1600 pages. Since 1995, but especially in the past few years, the readership has grown rapidly: during February, 2005, for example, CJEAP experienced over 10,000 “hits”—almost double the typical figures from just three years ago. The journal now employs a two-person staff and utilizes 25 reviewers from four different countries.

Some of the growth, of course, may reflect the growth of the Internet in society at large, and especially in academic work. But it also suggests that CJEAP is fulfilling the unique academic and policy-making mission of highlighting educational issues and problems as they relate to Canada and Canadian society. So far, this mission seems to include the following: 1) case studies of educational problems and initiatives in specific Canadian jurisdictions, 2) comparative studies of Canadian educational activities with other, non-Canadian societies or jurisdictions, and 3) discussions of educational issues as they affect Canadian educators and policy-makers. The first type—case studies—is illustrated by Issue #24 (“Moving from denominational to linguistic education in Quebec”), Issue #27 (“Leadership and culture in schools in Northern British Columbia”). The second—comparative studies—is illustrated by Issue #32 (“Initial teacher education in Canada and the United Kingdom”) and by Issue #34 (“Athletic gender equity policy in Canadian universities”). The third—discussions of issues as they affect Canadians—is illustrated by Issue #29 (“Intersectoral response to children with complex health care needs”) and by Issue #35 (“Teaching to the test: What every educator and policy-maker should know”). But for all three categories there are other examples as well.

Note that these categories were never defined formally or a priori, but simply evolved over time. Not every issue of CJEAP has fit neatly into one of the categories (see, for example, Issue #26, “Educational psychology as a policy science”), though a disproportionate number of them have. Whether a manuscript belongs in CJEAP or not has been determined primarily by the opinions of CJEAP reviewers, and there is good reason to expect these to continue evolving in the future, as they have in the past.

Which raises the question: just how should CJEAP develop in the future? Should the journal simply do more of what it is already doing—more of the three types of articles listed above? Or should it do something(s) new—even if envisioned only dimly at present? Perhaps, for example, CJEAP should be publishing more comparative studies (Canada compared to other societies), to honour the international nature of the Internet and of modern scholarship. Or perhaps it should be publishing larger numbers of briefer pieces—research notes, brief position papers, book reviews and the like. Perhaps we should be asking you to register every time you access the journal (at no charge, of course), so that we editors can keep better records of the comparative “popularity” of different issues or articles in the journal, and tailor future issues to readers’ needs better.

Perhaps the journal should affiliate more strongly with one or more professional societies whose missions are similar to the journal’s, and draw on those societies for support, advice, or (God willing) financial resources. With regard to the last point, I should note that CJEAP is primarily a volunteer organization. Only one of us is paid, and the rest of us (myself as editor and all reviewers) are volunteers.
As volunteers, of course, we give time to the journal because we love the work and believe in what it accomplishes. But we could use advice from time to time.

For starters, I encourage you to consider the comments above, both about what CJEAP is doing currently and about what it might do differently in the future. Let us know (either myself, Kelvin Seifert or Karen Poetker) what you believe CJEAP should continue doing, as well as how it should develop next.