Democracy and Education

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Inaugural Open-Access Issue

Letter from the Executive Editor

On behalf of the editors and staff of Democracy & Education, I am delighted to welcome you to this completely redesigned, open-access, online journal. With more than a year of planning and implementation work behind us, we are excited to present this inaugural volume. For those of you who have followed the journal in the past, you will notice a number of important changes. For those of you reading Democracy & Education for the first time, I’m happy to offer the following description of what you will find here. The mission of the journal is to provoke rigorous, open, and inclusive engagement with the challenges of educating youth for active participation in a democratic society. We seek to support and sustain conversations that take as their focus the conceptual foundations, social policies, institutional structures, and teaching/learning practices associated with democratic education. While every period has its special claim on the need for collective wisdom and collaborative social action, we have engaged in this process with a special sense of urgency and deeply felt commitment to the challenges we face today at virtually every level in our society—from our smallest communities to the broadest global perspective. We seek to open another door for critical and creative engagement with these challenges, and a venue to share multiple perspectives on how we might rise to meet them. Moving Democracy & Education online has allowed us to focus even more energy on the dialogic quality of the journal and to build into its infrastructure a commitment to sustaining conversations over time. You will find in each volume a series of feature articles addressing a wide range of issues in the field of democratic education. You will also find at least one response to each feature article, and often more (we hope), in the same volume. As the online publication process continues in what we call an “articles building to an issue format,” readers are encouraged to submit additional responses, which will be peer-reviewed and published upon acceptance. We encourage responses from multiple audiences, as well as in multiple formats—see, for example, the video response from Bonny Gildin of the All Stars Project published in this issue. You will also find book reviews in each issue, and the editors are busy exploring other potential material, including interviews and timely commentaries. So, we hope you enjoy this new evolution in the journal’s history and that you are inspired to join in the conversation. Scott Fletcher Dean, Graduate School of Education and Counseling Lewis & Clark College