Chemical Education Today
Editorial: Coalescing the Chemical Education Community It is customary—and a good idea as well—for a new editor to reflect on what has gone before and to propose goals, plans, hopes for the future. I know three of the six previous editors of the Journal: Bill Kieffer, Tom Lippincott, and Joe Lagowski. Each of them has provided energy, leadership, and judgment that have made this the best and most widely disseminated source of information and ideas about chemical education in the world. It is a distinct and somewhat daunting honor to occupy a position that has been graced by persons of their quality, and New editors,…, for whom I have such great admiration. often appear to be My most important goal as an interesting blend editor is to maintain, nourish, and augment what previous ediof naïvete and tors have built: a community of innovationary zeal. persons dedicated to and working for improved chemical educaW. T. Lippincott, tion throughout the world. This 1967 44, 375. Journal should serve as a focal point and foundation for that community, while at the same time maintaining the highest standards of quality and timeliness for the information and ideas it provides. Like the Gilbertian policeman’s, an editor’s lot is not always a happy one. Making decisions with which others may disagree, and that may have important effects on their careers, is part of the job. Such decisions need to be based on a firmly grounded concept of what this Journal should be. Editorial policies will be based on that philosophy, and they should be ironed out through two-way communication with all parts of the Journal’s constituency. That constituency includes anyone who is interested in chemical education, whether in a middle school, high school, two-year college, college, university, industry, government, science museum, or teacher-training program. The most important item in this editor’s philosophy is that the reader comes first. Though we could not publish a journal without authors, it is readers who make this publication worthwhile, useful, and, yes, possible. You, and so many more like you, are the community that the Journal aims to serve and the reason We count heavily on the… for its existence. I hope that you will “This-is-what-the-Journalfeel a real sense of ought-to-be” ownership in and responsibility for correspondence. this Journal and W. F. Kieffer 1955 32, 497. the community it represents. I invite your participation in a very important, ongoing institution that you can help mold to support and reflect your interests and those of chemical education. If you are an author, you belong to the second most important group that contributes to and is served by the Journal. We depend on you to provide manuscripts that include important pedagogical content, that appeal to our entire constituency or to a clearly identifiable part of it, that do not duplicate what has already been published, and that are written in clear, concise English at a level suitable for the intended audience. In return we provide
a forum for your ideas and will help you to disseminate activities and materials that you have developed to help students learn better. The Guide to Submissions on page 910 of this issue is the beginning of a dialog with you, an author or prospective author, regarding how we can interact most effectively to disseminate your ideas. Readers and authors should note that we have restructured the Journal’s content into these main areas: • Chemical Education Today: a new section that brings you news and commentary about chemical education, reports from associations, letters to the editor, and other timely material. • Chemistry Every Day for Everyone: applications of chemistry, historical insights, and other items of broad interest. • In the Classroom: teaching tips, demonstrations, and new ways of approaching chemical content and principles. • In the Laboratory: experiments and laboratory exercises, often in microscale, and information about laboratory safety. • Information/Textbooks/Media/Resources: reviews, information technology and multimedia, and other resources for teaching and learning. • Research: Science and Education: reports on science education research, pedagogically based reviews of important new chemical and interdisciplinary research, and other material written for an informed nonspecialist.
Cutting across this structure is the Secondary School Chemistry Section, which will have a new editor at year’s end. Emory Howell of the Univer…this Journal is sity of Southern Mississippi will contribute to rededicated to the and identify from all of proposition that teachers these sections articles of particular interest to of chemistry are also high school teachers. students of that subject. This Journal is designed on the premise J. J. Lagowski, 1979 56, 7. that its readers are not only teachers but also students of chemistry and pedagogy. I hope that the organization described above will help you to find and learn what you want in the quickest, most effective way. If it does not serve you well, I will expect to hear your views on how it could be improved, just as I would expect to hear from students in a classroom. I have had the opportunity and the responsibility of putting together a new staff for the Journal here at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I can assure both readers and authors that you are in good hands. There is currently a level of talent, excitement, camaraderie, enthusiasm, and diligence that I am certain will serve the Journal well for a long time. Members of our staff are introduced in the News from Journal House column on page A186. You are likely to run into them at meetings and to communicate with them by phone, fax, or electronic mail. All of us invite your participation in helping the Journal to continue as an ever improving means of coalescing the community of chemical education. Read it. Learn from it. React to it and send us your views. Convince your colleagues of its value and induce them to subscribe. Volunteer to review papers or edit a column. Or suggest a new way to serve the Journal that I have not thought of. I invite your communication, participation, and hard work!
Vol. 73 No. 9 September 1996 • Journal of Chemical Education
A185
