When we launched Studies in Engineering Education last summer, we never expected (how many times have you said that lately?) to be publishing our first article in the midst of a global pandemic that has radically changed our lives individually and communally. As academics, most of us have been challenged to rapidly shift from face-to-face classes to some approximation of remote learning while students and teachers alike grapple with effects of COVID-19. At the same time, our responsibilities for scholarship and service continue. But this work, too, has been altered as we Zoom into committee meetings and carry out research virtually. Many research project have moved away from in-person data collection to video interviews and many articles are now planned, written, and reviewed in emergent home offices that are suddenly either far more solitary or far more crowded than our campus workplaces.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that amid all this change, our first article, by Julie P. Martin and Chavone Garza, is also a kind of disruption. Together these authors help us see the systems of oppression within engineering that work against students from marginalized communities, but they also challenge us to re-see the relationship between researcher and participant as they raise issues of power, equity, and justice in engineering education research. We are grateful that they have chosen to publish this work in SEE, and proud to offer their article as an introduction to the kind of scholarship SEE hopes to foreground.
In the same spirit of disruption, we are thrilled to be able to launch SEE as an open-access journal, alongside the Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (JPEER) and Advance in Engineering Education (AEE). Some of you may have read the recent commentary by Monica Cardella (JPEER’s former editor) on why open access matters for our field. SEE is committed to this vision and to the need to make publicly funded research widely available to the global public so that scholars and citizens around the world can engage in dialogue around what engineering education is, where it has come from, and where it is headed. This open access forum is made possible through the commitment Virginia Tech Publishing, the scholarly publishing hub of Virginia Tech and the publisher of the journal, along with the generous support from the Department of Civil Engineering at Oregon State and the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech.
Publishing any article, of course, requires more than just authors and editors. During these challenging times, we appreciate our team at SEE, including the advisory board, associate editors, reviewers, copyeditors, and journal management system support team (because we all need to keep learning new platforms, right?) who are the foundation of our journal. Our Advisory Board - Jennifer Case (Virginia Tech), Donna Riley (Purdue University), and Jennifer Turns (University of Washington) – has provided critical advice and guidance as we move forward. Our associate editors – James Huff (Harding University), Shawn Jordan (Arizona State University), and Jo Walther (University of Georgia) – have played a crucial role in shaping the tone and focus of the journal as they solicit reviews, make recommendations, and work with authors. And, of course, the anonymous reviewers who give their time to the community provide the feedback needed to bring out the best in each submission.
We are also excited to now meet you, our readers, and look forward to engaging with you in the months and years ahead. We hope that as you read this you are safe and healthy, and able to manage your professional and personnel lives in ways that are sustainable as we face these new challenges.
SEE has received 37 submissions to date, including 26 for our special issue on Theories and Methods in Engineering Education. The submissions cover a broad variety of topic areas and interpretive methods, and several more articles are moving through the system and on their way to publication, so stay tuned as the journal continues to grow. We invite you as readers, authors, and reviewers, to be part of this community and help us move SEE and our field forward to make a positive and lasting impact on engineering education.
Welcome to SEE!
Shane Brown and Marie C. Paretti
Co-Editors
Posted on 19 May 2020
As part of our mission to expand the conversations among engineering education researchers, SEE Co-Editors Shane Brown and Marie Paretti invite papers for a special issue of the journal exploring theories, methods, and the interplay between them in our field from a variety of perspectives. As an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of education, social sciences, and education, engineering education often borrows and adapts frameworks and methods from other fields to guide our research. In this special issue, we invite authors to deepen our conversation around these practices by bringing a critical lens to them. Questions to consider might include the following: How do we as a field use theories, and to what end? How do we choose methods, and what are the implications of those choices? What are the relationships between theory and method in our work?
In addressing these and other pertinent questions about theory and/or method, submissions to the special issue might include the following types of papers:
Literature reviews that examine and interrogate the theoretical frameworks and/or research methods used in the field - either broadly or around specific issues - to both understand and critique our approaches;
Empirical articles that provide analytic reflections on the choices made around theory and/or method selections for a given project, and the implications of those choices for both the project and the field;
Theoretical articles that invite us to re-examine the research culture in our field as it pertains to theories and methods to consider both what they accomplish and what they miss or hinder.
If you have an idea for paper and would like to explore whether it fits within the scope of this special issue, please contact the SEE editors; we would be happy to talk with you.
Timeline
Abstracts Due Jan 15, 2020
We ask authors to review the abstract guidelines on the journal website. However, because the call invites a range of approaches and because these abstracts will be reviewed to invite full papers, abstracts may be up to 750 words (rather than the usual 300-word limit) and may adapt the abstract structure as needed to fit the proposed paper. Submit your abstract through the journal's submission system (in the Abstract section), but with no attached file - the abstract is sufficient. If the abstract is accepted, you will be able to use this same submission to upload the full manuscript.
Full Manuscripts Due June 1, 2020
Full manuscripts will be sent out for peer review, with reviews returned to authors in September 2020.
Final Manuscripts Due Nov. 15, 2020
Accepted manuscripts will be published online as soon as they are ready, with the full issue closing when all articles are published.
Posted on 23 Oct 2019
Posted on 11 Jun 2019