Editor's Note, March 2006

Elizabeth Haller
PhD Student and Instructor, Kent State University
E-mail: editoraee@hotmail.co

Finally!  We apologize that the first issue of the New Year is a little late in coming.   Unfortunately, the December 2005 issue of AEE was the last to be uploaded by our longtime web editor, Arthur Kingsland.  Arthur has been crucial to the success of our journal, and his fantastic contribution to AEE will not be forgotten.  He will be sorely missed.  We wish him nothing but the best in his new endeavors. 

Publication of the journal was temporarily suspended as we sought an individual to fill the position of web editor, which was not an altogether simple task.  Fortunately, Jeff Davies has consented to help us out as acting web editor.  Thank you so much Jeff.  As a result of our suspension, however, rather than eleven issues, we are expecting to publish only nine issues this year (March through December, with a double issue for June and July). 

Enjoy this issue’s submissions, and as you do, consider offering a piece of your work for publication.  Perhaps it could be one of those smaller, attainable goals I encourage each of us to set for ourselves at the start of every year.  We invite your continued perusal and encourage you to submit articles, poetry, and fiction for consideration in future issues of AEE.  Please review our Call for Papers on this site for more details on submission requirements.  If you are unsure whether your contribution would be suitable under the terms of our Call for Papers, please send along an inquiry, and I will be happy to respond forthwith.  As always, do not forget to check out Grist for the Mill for possible submission ideas.

A reminder that if you are interested in joining our editorial staff, positions are available.  Please e-mail me for more details.

            Please look for the April issue of AEE to read the first columns of the new year by our featured columnists Lynne Fukuda and Susan Jones. 

It is with this first issue of the new year that we welcome back longtime contributor Dan Lukiv who will enrich the next twelve issues with a collection of daily haikus.  Chapter One of his series will begin with the April issue, but we have here provided both the Introduction and the Forward to his collection, providing a hint of what to expect from Lukiv in the coming year. 

Jeffrey Paris begins this month’s issue with his article titled “Untimely Meditations on Plato’s Bureaucracy.”  In this essay, Paris “playfully offers the image of a modern-day Descartes, now an instructor at a comprehensive state university, struggling to find the epistemological certainty that would justify his reappointment given the new mandate to produce outcomes and assessment criteria.  He discovers that, in Plato’s Republic, there is a hierarchical model of discriminating talents that mirrors today’s competitive educational enterprise, though it has an embedded absurdity: the teacher is presumed to have special evaluative talents that surpass intelligibility.” Paris states he then moves from this to a “critique of the system of grading as a whole and offer up some examples from my own experience with experimental forms of student evaluation, cynically concluding that, while provocative, such experiments do not fundamentally challenge what I call ‘flexible accommodation’—the primary skill of survival in a bureaucracy—which I consider to be the true lesson being taught in most higher education settings.”

This month’s second feature comes from Tonya Callaghan. “‘That’s so gay:’ A Narrative Vignette of My Experience as a Lesbian in Catholic Schools,” is an example of autoethnography – “a form of writing that presents the researcher’s own experience as a legitimate topic of investigation. In this autobiographical piece, I engage in multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural and, ultimately, to the critical pedagogy that frames my research. My goal is to heighten the awareness among other educators regarding the types of discrimination that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-identified, and queer persons experience in schools. I ask my readers to feel the truth of my story and to become a co-participant, engaging in the story emotionally and intellectually.”

Madeline Sonik wraps up this issue’s features with her story “Luna.”  According to Sonik, “in this story, there is an astronaut’s brothel on the dark side of the moon and it’s inhabited by lunar women. The story was inspired by an image in a dream, and I wrote it as a way of experimenting with the rendering of dream images in fiction. Instead of taking control of the image and forcing it into a plot-driven narrative, I attempted to allow the image and language to organically create the story.  I felt, as I wrote it, as if I were unearthing a great mystery. I feel this sense of mystery, still, when I read it.”

S. Purcell Woodard returns with two new poems for the Poetry Corner.  With “The Time is Upon Us,” Woodard states: “I spoke this piece/peace into existence at a staff retreat for eighty-plus coworkers/colleagues from across our division, including our executive staff.  My charge was to lead a discussion about how we could collectively generate a student development plan -- a means for us to do our work more consistently, seamlessly.  My poem served as our framework for our pending inter/actions, which were to be centered on my proposed conceptual model of our multifaceted work.  My poem was met with absolute silence.  This (initial) reaction both humbled and confused me.”  In “Welcome Home”:  “I spoke this piece/peace into existence at our first annual Fall Orientation for new and transfer students.  This poem represents my interpretation of our approach to our students, our colleagues, and our collective work.  I share it here as additional context for understanding our student development plan.”

ENJOY and, since I didn’t get to say it in January, HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!