Call for papers closed

Coordinator: Dr. Alfredo Bautista

Call open from: January 2013
Manuscript submission deadline: 30th  June 2013

Infancia y Aprendizaje invites junior researchers in the journal’s thematic areas to submit empirical manuscripts for the publication of a special issue that will be entitled “The peer-review process as an opportunity for learning”.

The experience of submitting a manuscript to a peer-reviewed scientific journal constitutes a valuable learning opportunity for the author, regarding both the research topic addressed in the manuscript and the way in which the content is communicated and presented (organization and structure of ideas, stylistic and formatting aspects, etc.). Receiving detailed analyses, critical but at the same time constructive, from several experts in the research area represents an invaluable resource in the academic writing process. This provides authors with diverse and enriching perspectives on their own work, helping them to identify and overcome the manuscript’s main theoretical and/or empirical weaknesses, to construct more solid and compelling arguments, to polish the manuscript and improve its style, and oftentimes even to re-write it from more original or appropriate angles.

This special issue has several purposes. First, to offer some of our readers -in particular, those who are newer to research- this opportunity for learning under carefully designed conditions, that allow maximizing both the quality of the review process and the final product, that is, the published manuscript. Read more about this purpose in this call for papers' full text.

The second purpose of this project continues in the line of several editorial analyses published in Infancia y Aprendizaje some years ago (see Sánchez, García & del Río, 2002; Scheuer, Bautista, Martín & Pozo, 2009). The goal this time is to make visible to our readers the “bowels” of the editorial process, from beginning to end, offering models that allow us to reflect upon our own practices as authors, and also as reviewers.Read more about this purpose in this call for papers' full text.

Finally, this special issue intends to disseminate Infancia y Aprendizaje among new generations of researchers in the thematic areas of the journal, providing them with a space to become protagonists, as authors, of our journal’s pages.

Call for papers closed

Manuscript submission deadline: December 31st, 2012.

Traditionally, universities have been an amplifier of social, scientific, cultural, political, and economic conflicts. Although always slowly –we cannot forget that the mission of universities is to conserve the so-called scientific knowledge and to avoid unsubstantiated fashions and fads– the universities have managed to adapt many situations and contexts, meeting the demands of each time.

However, universities have rarely been faced to times as turbulent as the current ones, characterized by a deep global crisis of the academic model (incursion of ICT, based-on-competencies curriculum, mobility needs, accountability, etc.), of the economic model (global deficit, bankrupt states, failure in economic markets, etc.), as well as of the socio-political model (student protest movements, the emergence of radical ideologies, etc.). In the context of this maelstrom, it seems surprising that university teachers (e.g., professors, lecturers, teaching fellows) are still in many cases former students, with little or no training preparation. University teachers often move from learning in the classroom, as students, to teaching others, as educators. Their teaching commonly draws on their own mostly implicit conceptions about the meaning and sense that learning and teaching their own subject matter have.