Focus and Scope

“Dialogic Pedagogy: A Journal for Studies of Dialogic Education” is an international peer-reviewed interactive online open-access journal free of charge for authors or readers. Its purpose is to advance international scholarship and pedagogical practice in the broadly defined area of dialogic education. The journal is international, multidisciplinary, multi-paradigmatic, and multicultural in scope. It accepts NEW (not previously published in English) manuscripts or translations of manuscripts previously published in other languages. The criteria for acceptance include a novel and important contribution to scholarship and/or significantly expanded previous scholarship that addresses the dialogic nature of education, teaching, and/or learning in formal institutional and informal settings. We think that the relationship between education and dialogue should not be limited to or defined by particular institutions, specific settings, the age of the participants, or fields of study, as new visions and insight on particular dialogic and educational tensions can arise from debates among paradigms, practices, and events. Hence, we encourage any research scholars and practitioners with an interest in dialogue and education to submit articles for editorial consideration. We encourage pioneers, visionaries, critics, innovators, and revolutionaries of Education to contribute. We also encourage discussions of various educational paradigms that promote and/or suppress educational dialogues, as well as different ecologies of education: traditional schooling, progressive schooling, democratic schooling, de-schooling, and unschooling.

We loosely define “dialogic education” as any scholarship and pedagogical practice from researchers, philosophers, and practitioners (including educatees, learners, and students) that values and gives priority to “dialogue” in learning/teaching/educating across a wide range of institutional and non-institutional learning settings. At this point, a variety of approaches to dialogic pedagogy have emerged. This includes but is not limited to, the instrumental, interactional, epistemological, ecological, and ontological approaches to dialogue in education. We embrace diverse perspectives despite their possibly irreconcilable contradictions, disagreements, and dualisms. Juxtaposing conflicting ideologies and practices of dialogic pedagogy provides for authentic questions and tensions to emerge as scholars across various settings for learning and cultural/historical practices provide rich perspectives on the problematics of dialogue in education. 

We believe that the Journal for the study of dialogic education has to promote a public discourse on what dialogue and dialogic pedagogy are, what they mean, and how they relate to education rather than provide gatekeeping, censorship, or silencing of diverse approaches in the name of “true dialogue,” “true dialogic education,” “authentic education,” or “true dialogic pedagogy” (although this assertive discourse is welcome as well). Certainly, a journal on dialogic education should neither censor ideas nor develop an (impossible) consensus. Rather, the journal is founded on the idea that the scholarly community should engage in dialogue about the meaning of dialogue in education and dialogic pedagogy. In other words, it should practice what it preaches. Through dissemination of scholarship in the journal, scholars will have an invaluable opportunity to engage in an international debate about what “dialogic pedagogy” means across a diverse range of ideologies, values, settings (e.g., formal institutional and informal), histories, countries, social groups, and cultural practices.

Education, teaching, learning, education without pedagogy, self-education, self-directed education, are broadly defined to include conventional and non-conventional institutional settings for learning and education, as well as informal, “free-choice learning environments” such as museums and teaching/learning in settings not explicitly designed for learning such as for example, parenting and other informal everyday settings. 

Scholars in fields outside of education but relevant to dialogic pedagogy are also encouraged to submit manuscripts (and participate in commentaries and online discussion, for instance, on the Journal’s Facebook group), including but not limited to humanities, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, social work, psychology, philology, political science, social and criminal justice, philosophy, and so on. We also encourage philological, philosophical, and theological contributions about important dialogic thinkers of the past and present (e.g., Bakhtin, Buber, Arendt, Freire, Habermas, Voloshinov, Gadamer, Lévinas, Medvedev, Rorty, Bibler, Dewey, Adler, Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, Vygotsky, Piaget, Marx, Nicholas from Cusa, Rancière, etc.), addressing issues of concern to dialogic education and dialogic pedagogy or pedagogical aspects related to human relations fields (e.g., psychology, social work, sociology, etc.), and description and analysis of innovative dialogic pedagogical practices. 

Submissions in diverse interactive formats must make substantial contributions to the scholarship and practice through broadly defined research and/or theoretical and practice-based reflective discussions of the dialogic nature of teaching/learning or dialogue as a practice in teaching/learning. Discussions of a dialogic research methodology (and anti-methodology) and debating epistemological, moral, political, and ontological issues in dialogic pedagogy are welcome as well.

This multi- and inter-disciplinary journal falls between Social Sciences and Humanities. We view the journal’s audience as international scholars and educators interested in broadly defined dialogic pedagogy.

The journal is indexed at least in the following databases:

1. 1. Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/
   2. ERIC https://eric.ed.gov/
   3. Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) https://mjl.clarivate.com/
   4. SCOPUS https://www.scopus.com/ 
   5. Education Source https://www.ebscohost.com/academic/education-source
   6. The Finnish Publication Forum (http://www.julkaisufoorumi.fi/en) Level 1
   7. The Danish system (bibliometriske-forskningsindikator or BFI) https://ufm.dk/forskning-og-innovation/statistik-og-analyser/den-bibliometriske-forskningsindikator Level 1
   8. The PKP Index https://index.pkp.sfu.ca/
   9. JournalSeek https://journalseek.net
   10. Open Access Journals Search Engine (OAJSE) https://www.oajse.com/ 
   11. SHERPA/RoMEO https://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php
   12. Worldcat https://www.worldcat.org/
   13. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) https://doaj.org/
   14. Jurn https://www.jurn.org
   15. Mendeley https://www.mendeley.com

Publisher

 

Peer Review Process

Peer reviewing policy

Stage#1 (3 weeks)

1)    Submission of an original manuscript via electronic online submission;

2)    Quick and holistic judgement by the DPJ Main Editors whether the manuscript fits the Focus and Scope of the Journal, has acceptable scholarship quality, and is comprehensible. If it does not, the Author will be notified by email of rejection. In rare cases, a promising manuscript can be returned to the Author if something important is missing, thereby preventing the review process. The Main Editors' judgment is "liberal": if one Main Editor judges the manuscript positively, it moves to the next step (for 1-2 weeks).

3)    Assignment of 1-2 managing editors from the Editorial Board and one Main Editor to the manuscript. The role of the Main Editor on the Managing Editors Team (MET) is to represent the voice of the Author. For practical matters, MET can be smaller because of organizational challenges (for about a week);

4)    Quick but more in-depth judgment and decision by the Managing Editors Team (MET) on whether the manuscript has to be rejected without sending it to the full-scale peer review. The rejection should be based on being outside the Aims and Scope of the journal OR on having unsalvageable problems with the quality of its argumentation, grounding, and/or research that would not promise an important contribution or productive dialogue in the DP field (no revision is possible). If the Managing Editors disagree or all find the manuscript promising, it moves to the next step. In rare cases, a promising manuscript can be returned to the Author if something important is missing, thereby preventing the external review process.  (2 weeks);

Stage#2 (5-7 weeks)

5) The Managing Editors Team selects 3-4 competent referees (minimum 2) in the appropriate field in or out of the DPJ community and sends them the manuscript, aiming for a 4-week review. If the invited referees do not accept the assignment within a week or two, they must be replaced with new referees. The referees provide recommendations to the editors, justifications, and suggestions (if appropriate) based on their own authorial judgment (4-6 weeks);

6)     The Managing Editors Team makes their authorial decision informed by the Referees’ Comments and their own authorial judgment: (“Decline Submission”, “Resubmit for (new) Review”, “(minor)Revision Required”, or “Accept Submission (as it is)”. If they cannot make the decision, the Editor-in-Chief is assigned to make it (or a Deputy of the Editor-in-Chief, depending on circumstances) (1 week);

7)      If the manuscript is sent back to the author(s) for major or minor revisions, and the author(s) decide to follow the recommendations and resubmit the revised manuscript, there is a 5-month deadline for resubmissions. If the revisions are not submitted within 5 months, the article will be automatically archived, unless a new deadline is negotiated with the Managing Editors. If the author(s) still wish to pursue publication in DPJ, they will be asked to submit a new manuscript. In case the author(s) decide to withdraw the manuscript, they should inform the Managing Editors right away.

Total for the first reviewing cycle: about 7-10 weeks.

Consecutive reviewing cycles, if needed, can be shorter based on the managing editors’ judgments, omitting some steps or abbreviating others, depending on the issues with the manuscript.

In cases where a manuscript is accepted and moving to the minor revision, copyediting, and layout preparation stage, the managing editors may solicit commentaries from the participating or non-participating DP community, referees, or even themselves. Any member of the DP community can volunteer to comment, provided their comments go through the managing editors’ review process.

Part II. Anonymity, attribution, and collaboration

a)        Authors are encouraged to nominate Managing Editors and referees for their manuscript, experts in the addressed area, without any promise or obligation on the part of the DPJ editors to invite any of them;

b)       Authors may choose to remain anonymous (i.e., masked) or attributed (i.e., known);

c)        Referees may choose to remain anonymous or be attributed to the authors and/or the public;

d)       During the reviewing process, both authors and referees may change their status from being anonymous to being attributed to each other (and public or just to each other);

e)       DPJ Main Editors can submit their manuscripts for peer-reviewed publications. However, to avoid a conflict of interest or its appearance, they must submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts under a newly created pseudonym DPJ account. They should remain anonymous to the other Main Editors, all Managing Editors who signed their manuscript, and external reviewers, if and until their paper is accepted. The rest of the Main Editors, the assigned Managing Editors, and the external reviewers should remain blind with regard to the real authorship of the manuscript. Thus, this policy precludes collaboration by ALL DPJ Main Editors on a peer-reviewed article, while collaboration by fewer than all is possible.

Part III. Authors’ disagreements and conflicts with the Managing Editors’ decision about their manuscript

First, let us state that it should be expected by DPJ that authors may legitimately disagree with DPJ Managing Editors' decisions about the fate of their manuscripts and/or concrete recommendations. These disagreements are common and normal, both as embedded in the logic of the peer-review process and in the personal experience of scholars. Although it may feel personal at times, there is nothing personal in these growing disagreements: scholars often view each other's scholarship differently and disagreeably. The differences in how these natural disagreements are handled in DPJ are that, unlike many other academic journals, we have a public forum where authors can share their grievances, and we can discuss these issues as an academic community. Also, we (i.e., DPJ community) are concerned about an imbalance of power between the authors (on the one side) and Managing Editors and external reviewers (on the other side) embedded in the current peer-review process in favor of the second side. To address this structural problem of the power imbalance, we appoint a Main Editor to represent the author(s)’s voice on the Managing Editors Team. We hope that this appointment could help to develop better, more respectful, democratic, meaningful, and dialogic peer-review journal practices. 

Second, Managing Editors should have a legitimate right to overrule judgments of external reviewers. The Editorial decision about the fate of the manuscript is formed by the independent authorial judgments of the Managing Editors Team, assigned to a submitted manuscript, informed by external reviews. It is NOT a result of a mechanical counting of how many external reviewers are “PRO” or “AGAINST,” but rather is based on the MET's authorial judgments informed by the external reviews.

Third, the final authority and responsibility for the manuscript belongs to the DPJ authors, who may decide to accept or reject some or all of the judgments and suggestions proposed by the Managing Editors and/or external reviewers. The suggestions of the Managing Editors and reviewers are merely potential directions for the authors to consider in their efforts to produce a high-quality manuscript and NOT conditions for publication. When authors choose to disagree with the Managing Editors and/or external reviewers, their justifications for their decisions can be very helpful for the Managing Editors and the external reviewers of the revised manuscript.

Fourth, although the final authority for the manuscript lies with the DPJ authors, the final authority for publication in DPJ lies with the DPJ Managing Editors.

The following policy addresses possible diverse conflicts between the Third and the Fourth points:

Case 1: The authors feel that the external peer reviews are not helpful or do not offer a fair critique of their manuscript, while trusting in the Managing Editors Team.

If the authors feel that their scholarship spirit is not being understood enough by some or all external reviewers or that some or all external reviewers are not fair (e.g., paradigmatic gatekeeping), they may ask the Managing Editors to change some or all external reviewers.

Case 2: The authors are satisfied with the Managing Editors Team’s decision but dissatisfied with their particular recommendations

If the authors agree with the Managing Editors Team’s decision but disagree with their suggestions, the authors should make their authorial revisions as they feel appropriate in light of reviews (and, of course, based on their own authorial judgments).  In an additional letter, authors should keep track of their revising decisions and their justifications, including rejections of the current Managing Editors Team’s suggestions. This letter may help the Managing Editors and the external reviewers better understand the authors’ angle on the manuscript and their scholarship.

Case 3: The authors are dissatisfied with the Managing Editors Team’s decision

If the authors are not satisfied with the Managing Editors Team’s decision, they should contact the DPJ Main Editors. The DPJ Main Editors will appoint different and additional temporary Managing Editors. The Temporary Managing Editors will consider all the reviews (external and from the current Managing Editors) and then form their own authorial judgment, which will be final.

Case 4: The authors continue to be dissatisfied with nearly all the Managing Editors Team’s and external reviewers’ suggestions

If the authors find most suggestions by the external reviewers and the Managing Editors, appointed and temporary, unhelpful for their own voice, DPJ may not be the best choice of journal for their manuscript. In this case, the authors may want to consider withdrawing their manuscript and submitting it elsewhere, regardless of the Managing Editors’ judgment of seeing its promise for DPJ.

In a case of disputes with the Managing Editors that they cannot resolve themselves, the authors are encouraged to contact the DPJ Main Editors — the Editor-in-Chief and the 2 Deputy Editors — for their help and authority. For this reason, only one of the 3 DPJ Main Editors may be appointed as a Managing Editor for any particular manuscript.

If one or two Main Editors submit a manuscript as its authors, they should use pseudonyms and pseudonym DPJ accounts, known only to themselves and to the rest of the Main Editors who cannot serve as Managing Editors. All communication by the authors who are thr Main Editors has to be managed from the pseudonym account and a separate pseudonym email address. In case of a dispute described above, Temporary Managing Editors can be appointed by the Main Editors, who are not the authors.  If all 3 Main Editors submit a manuscript as its authors, the Editors of the Book Reviewer section will be appointed to manage conflicts between the authors and the Managing Editors of this manuscript.

 

Part IV. Non-sexist and non-discriminatory language journal policy

The journal is committed to gender-neutral, gender-inclusive, and inclusive language that aims to eliminate (or neutralize) references to gender in descriptions of people. For example, the words fireman, lesbian, stewardess, and, arguably, chairman are gender-specific; the corresponding gender-neutral terms are firefighter, homosexual, flight attendant, and chairperson (or chair). The pronoun "he" may be replaced with "he or she" or "s/he" when the gender of the person referred to is unknown. Other gender-specific terms, such as actor and actress, may be replaced by the originally male term (actor used for either gender) (see more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language). Sexist, xenophobic, ethnic, national, body image, and homophobic slurs, or racist and classist terms should not be used unless it is a part of the research focus in itself.

Publication Frequency

The journal is volume-organized (except for a special issue of a thematically related collection of articles). All unrelated articles are published as soon as they are ready. The journal volume is defined by the year of publication of the articles.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, abides by the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access:

 

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

 

Researchers engage in discovery for the public good, yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions imposed by other publishers, research results are not available to the full community of potential users. It is our mission to support greater global knowledge exchange by making the research published in this journal open to the public and reusable under a Creative Commons CC-BY license.

 

Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their websites prior to and during the submission process, and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication. These practices benefit authors through productive exchanges and earlier, more widespread citation of published work.

 

There are no article processing charges, submission fees, or any other costs required of authors to submit articles to this journal.

Reviewer Guidelines

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for visiting our web page about peer reviewing.

The success of the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal (DPJ) and the field as a whole heavily depends on the work of the journal's peer reviewers, who assess and promote Dialogic Pedagogy scholarship. Engaging with a manuscript is, we believe, an act of scholarship, which benefits both the author(s) of an article and the reviewer him/herself, reviewing thus becomes part of a wider dialogue on the development and understanding of the field.

I. Purposes and tasks of the peer reviewing process
We see the main goal of the peer reviewing process in assuring the professional quality of scholarship in the broadly defined field of Dialogic Pedagogy (see the Focus and Scope). This goal is realized through the following functions of peer review:

1. Providing a justified recommendation to the DPJ Managing Editors Team by making an authorial professional judgment about whether or not the manuscript is suitable and (potentially) good enough for publication in the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal and justifying this judgment. However, the reviewer should not expect that this recommendation must be followed by the Managing Editors Team – the purpose of the recommendation is to inform the authorial independent judgments by the Managing Editors Team:
1. Accept Submission (i.e., publish as it is, the manuscript goes for the editing and layout processes);
2. Revision Required (i.e., accept with minor revisions, the manuscript goes to the author for suggested minor changes, no more external reviews involved);
3. Resubmit for Review (i.e., request major revisions and encourage resubmission without any promise to be published). The manuscript goes to the author for major revision and then for the next round of review, including external reviewers);
4. Decline Submission (i.e., reject either due to unsuitability or poor scholarly quality).
2. Providing justification of the Reviewer's overall judgment;
1. Sharing how the Reviewer read and understood the manuscripts and their strengths;
2. Identifying problems and issues affecting the quality of the manuscript;
3. If the reviewer does make recommendations for improvements, he or she should provide particular, detailed suggestions for the next revision to the author(s) with justifications, assuring and promoting the author's (NOT the reviewer’s) voice and contribution to the field. Also, these recommendations should be really suggestions, assuming the author’s final authority and responsibility for the his/her/their manuscript, rather than conditions for successful publication;
4. (Optional) If the reviewer judges that a manuscript should be rejected, she or he may try to offer (but is not required to) constructive suggestions for improvement so that it might be submitted elsewhere.
5. Where appropriate, providing feedback comments on the readability of the manuscript in its margins and in the text for the author(s);
6. (Optional) Providing a particular reader's response to the manuscript to the author(s), which is different than the review.

Thus, a peer reviewer for the DP journal will have several, at time conflicting, roles: a referee on quality and suitability, an advisor to the managing editors, a collegial helper to the author(s), a reader-commentator on the manuscript (optional).

II. Criteria for acceptance

A. Suitability of the manuscript for the Dialogic Pedagogy journal
The reviewer should determine whether the manuscript is suitable for the DPJ and its community, based on the journal's Focus and Scope. If you have doubts about the suitability and/or the description of the journal's Focus and Scope, please raise these doubts in your review to the editor.

B. Quality of the scholarship presented in the manuscript
A ‘good’ manuscript should make an important contribution to the field and have strong potential to generate important dialogue in the DPJ community (and, if possible, beyond it), in the reviewer's professional judgment. A dialogue-disagreement is not less valuable (but can even be more) than a dialogue-agreement. Agreement is not necessarily a proxy for truth. Thus, the manuscript does not necessarily have to resonate with the reviewer’s own views or to be convincing for the reviewer. If the reviewer's judgment is that the manuscript has a strong potential for generating an important scholarly dialogue through a revision process, the manuscript should not be rejected without giving an opportunity for the author to improve it through a guided revision process. The reviewer should provide guidance for improvement, justify it, give the authors the benefit of the doubt, and ask clarifying questions.

From a dialogic perspective, we do not believe that agreement or consensus among relevant parties is a good proxy for truth or the quality of scholarship. Even more, a strong, passionate disagreement between the reviewer and the author may signal the quality of the manuscript – we want to encourage the reviewer to volunteer to submit a response-disagreement for publication.

We do not believe that the quality and the rigor of scholarship can be ensured by a high rate of manuscript rejection. We believe that the criteria of quality never fully pre-exist the work of scholarship itself – any good scholarship generates new criteria of what good scholarship is about and transforms a relevant community of practice. The creative task of the peer reviewer is to identify new criteria of quality emerging in the manuscript's scholarship. We believe that the quality of scholarship will be ultimately established through "internally persuasive discourse" (Bakhtin, 1991), in which "truth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable" (Morson, 2004, p. 319).

Although we approach reviewing positively for this Journal, seeking to recognize the best in all manuscripts, unfortunately, from time to time, some manuscripts must be rejected. Rejection should occur when the reviewer expects, through his or her justified authorial judgment, that the manuscript is not salvable through any revision process, or when the author cannot deliver enough improvements after a few revision cycle(s), and/or the manuscript does not contribute to either scholarly dialogue or to the wider field of DPJ. The reviewer provides important and necessary gatekeeping on behalf of the entire DPJ community and readership. The process of rejection may be uncomfortable, even painful, but it is very important work for the DPJ community of practice. Accepting poor-quality scholarship can be detrimental to the field, the journal, and, arguably, even the author. The reviewer may offer constructive suggestions for the author of the rejected manuscript (optional).

III. Suggested structure of the external review
Here is our suggested structure of the external review:

To the Managing Editors only:

1. The reviewer's recommendation regarding publication of the manuscript (to): 
   1. Accept Submission (i.e., publish as it is, the manuscript goes for the editing and layout processes);
   2. Revision Required (i.e., accept with minor revisions, the manuscript goes to the author for suggested minor changes, no more external reviews involved);
   3. Resubmit for Review (i.e., request major revisions and encourage resubmission without any promise to be published). The manuscript goes to the author for major revision and then for the next round of review, including external reviewers);
   4. Decline Submission (i.e., reject either due to unsuitability or poor scholarly quality).
2. If any conflicts of interest affect the review or if there are important concerns about the reviewing process, the reviewer should articulate them (to the editors only).
3. Comments (optional)
4. Volunteering to submit a response for publication (optional).

To the Managing Editors and the Reviewer(s):

1. Please summarize the major points of the manuscripts as you see them – this may help the Managing Editors and the authors to contextualize your judgments.
2. Please abstract the major contributions of the manuscript to the field and its strengths, if you can find any.
3. Please provide justifications for your recommendation.
4. Please abstract major issues with the manuscript along with your examples from the text and justifications (if any).
5. Please list minor issues (if any).
6. Please provide collegial suggestions for the authors to improve the manuscripts (if applicable).
7. Readability feedback and editing suggestions through comments on the text's margins, suggested changes in the text, or at the end of the text (e.g., asking for clarification by providing an alternative reading of the text, requesting missing info, asking to split or reorganize sentences, breaking texts into paragraphs, suggesting a subheading). Please focus on the readability of the text, having the DP international readership in mind, rather than on the conventionality of scientific texts and the English Standard grammar. Please allow the author's cultural variation and personal experimentation with the style and genre, which can fruitfully diversify DP research (to the editors and the author). Clarity of communication addressing the DP community is the key issue here.
8. (Optional) Feel free to provide your particular reader's response to the manuscript.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

A)    Please do not be trapped by a stylistic or genre taste in judging the manuscript such as manuscript being "one-sided", "monologic", "not balanced", "authoritarian," and so on (remember Bakhtin's characterization of Tolstoy's novel as "monologic" – it would not have prevented Bakhtin from publishing Tolstoy's "monologic" novels!). Your judgment should be guided by the manuscript's contributions to and potential to provoke important dialogues in the field;

B)     Please try to complement your impressionistic observations on the manuscripts with examples from the manuscripts and your analysis;

C)    Publishable manuscripts should not be "weakness-free" but rather good enough for interesting public discussions;

D)    If you sense a paradigmatic disagreement or a paradigmatic "disgust" in yourself, this is a very good sign that this manuscript is worth publication. New paradigms should not be censored but published, although they may highly disturb our tastes and senses;

E)     If you feel becoming polemical with the author of the manuscript, we want to encourage you to develop a critical commentary for publication in DPJ along with the manuscript – please indicate this to the Managing Editors;

In problematic situations that you cannot resolve completely yourselves, please seek help and/or advice from the Managing Editors.

IV. The peer reviewing policy and procedures

1. Referees may choose to remain anonymous or be attributed to the authors and/or the public.
2. During the reviewing process, both authors and referees may change their status from anonymous to attributed (public or just to each other).
3. Referee's comments to the author(s) will be published on a special forum restricted to the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal website registered users.
4. During the referees' work on their peer reviews, referees are encouraged to visit and read comments posted on the special forum, restricted to registered users of the Dialogic Pedagogy Journal website, by members of the DP community and/or the author(s).

V. Tone of peer review
We see any scholarship process as often difficult and frustrating, with a rather unpredictable outcome for any scholar, whether emerging or experienced, struggling or highly successful in the past. Mistakes and failures can and do happen for every scholar. It is also a collegial, collective, discursive, and dialogic enterprise involving the entire ill-defined DPJ community. Also, peer reviewing involves asymmetrical application of power that can affect the institutional well-being of the author(s). Since we are all practicing scholars with particular ontological, political, moral, ethical agendas, cultural and institutional biases, scientific paradigms, histories and backgrounds, social affiliations, and institutional and personal needs; we should seek open-mindedness and respect of the author’s work in the review process, and review as far as possible with awareness of possible negative impacts. We should also expect, at times, conflicts of interest to interfere with, disrupt, and contaminate our peer reviewing process. We should also expect that some of these conflicts of interest may be invisible to us. Finally, we should expect our fallibility, i.e., our unknowing ignorance and, at times, our invisible and unintended arrogance. That is why we need to use our peer-reviewing power over the author(s) carefully, wisely, with reservations and self-doubt (humbly).

The principles that follow, we believe, are simply an articulation of good reviewing, which we are confident our reviewers would already demonstrate in practice. We suggest that the tone of peer reviewing should be:

1. Respectful (i.e., not putting the authors down, not patronizing, expecting that the author can legitimately reject our suggestions);
2. Collegial (i.e., addressing the author as an equal peer, sympathizing with the difficulties and problems that the author has faced);
3. Supportive (i.e., assuring and promoting the author's voice, affirming the author's contribution to the field, recognizing the author's actual and potential strengths);
4. Humble (i.e., we all are fallible and even more: we are fallible in ways that we do not know yet or ever);
5. Avoiding any discrimination (e.g., sexism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, racism, ageism, expertism, snobbism, hierarchism);
6. Avoiding silencing the author's voice and scholarship just because we disagree with the author's findings, paradigms, ideas, or arguments;
7. Answerable for the review to the author and a broader DPJ community (and even beyond).

We suggest you re-read the final draft of your review before sending it to the editors, as if you were the author receiving it, to test its tone.

VI. The reviewer's authorship
The review can be a solo or collective work with your colleagues. Apprenticeship of junior, emerging scholars is welcomed.

VII. Resignation from the peer review process
If, for any reason, you find yourself not being able to finish your review assignment, please inform the Managing Editors Team as soon as possible. Please do not feel very bad, we understand that diverse circumstances can interfere. You don’t need to provide any justification.

VIII. Ethical considerations
The DPJ does not necessarily agree or endorse theoretical and/or empirical findings, paradigmatic or conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches, or ethics of the scholarship published in the journal. The main goal of the journal is to publish scholarship of high scholarly quality that fits the journal's focus and scope for a broader public academic and educational forum. The DPJ does not reject manuscripts solely on the basis of ethical concerns about the submitted scholarship and/or empirical research, because we believe these concerns should be publicly discussed. To promote discussion of the ethics of scholarship and research, we want to encourage our DPJ external reviewers to raise emerging ethical concerns and issues regarding the scholarship and/or empirical research with the authors. If the authors of a submitted manuscript choose to ignore or reject these ethical concerns or the authors address them in a way that is viewed by the DPJ Managing Editors (at least one of them) as unsatisfactory or as worth of a further discussion, the DPJ Managers have a right to add a preamble to the publication, listing their ethical concerns for the readers. The authors have the right to review a draft of this preamble and to address it, which will become part of this preamble.

Have a meaningful, fair, and enjoyable reviewing process!

The DPJ Editorial Board

Genres, Format, Styles

1. The journal is volume-organized (except for a special issue of a thematically related collection of articles). All unrelated articles are published as soon as they are ready. The journal volume is defined by the year of publication of the articles.
2. The journal's core peer-reviewed genres:
   1. Purely conceptual and/or methodological papers;
   2. Ethnographic and empirical research with conceptual analysis and "thick descriptions";
   3. Description of and reflection on innovative dialogic educational practices;
   4. “Special issue” – a collection of thematically related papers.
3. DPJ welcomes submissions of manuscripts and multimedia in different genres, formats, lengths, and styles; innovations and experimentation are encouraged.
4. The journal's auxiliary non-peer-reviewed genres:
   1. Editorials (by the Main DPJ Editors);
   2. Video/audio recorded or transcripts of innovative dialogic educational practices with the possibility of fragment-by-fragment analysis of records and their discussions;
   3. Commentaries on published articles (both impressionistic and focused) (invited);
   4. Book reviews (invited or volunteered);
   5. Translations of previously published work;
   6. Scholarship Beyond Essayistic Texts;
   7. Manuscript work in progress for critical, supportive, non-judgmental peer feedback;
   8. Announcements for conferences and calendar events (e.g., journal fundraising);
   9. Links for other websites related to dialogic pedagogy and education.

In the future, we plan to add the following genres:

1. Future peer-reviewed genre: E-Books (e.g., “Dialogic Pedagogy Open Access Press”);
2. Future non-peer-reviewed genres:
   1. Interviews;
   2. Forum(s) for dialogic polemics on hot issues of DP;
   3. Blogging (appearing on some more or less regular basis, any registered reader can open a personalized blog);
   4. Wikis – for collaboration on a topic and/or a dictionary of dialogic pedagogy terms;
   5. Conference reports;
   6. Webinars;
   7. Podcasts.

Organizational structure and policies

 

Managing Editor Guidelines

The main purpose of the Managing Editors Team is to make your authorial decision, informed by the external reviewers (when the manuscript goes for the full external review), about the fate of the submitted manuscript, to which you are assigned.

The Managing Editors Team consists of two members of the DPJ Editorial Board and one of the DPJ Main Editors.

Managing Editors' work involves the following steps:

Step 0-1: Meet via email, Zoom, or MS Teams to discuss the Team's self-organization (who is doing what and how) and Step 1.

Step 1. Quick judgment. (7-10 days). The 3 Managing Editors (you) make a first decision on the manuscript:

The submitted manuscript would be rejected at this stage either because it is outside the journal's Focus and Scope OR because it presents unsalvageable problems with its argumentation, grounding, and/or research that would not promise an important contribution or productive dialogue in the DP field. A rejection of the manuscript should be based on the three Managing Editors' consensus about rejection. In this case, the Managing Editors should notify the authors that their manuscript has been rejected. Their e-mail should be informative and polite. The Managing Editors also inform the Editors-in-Chief about their decision.

If the Managing Editors disagree with each other or find the manuscript promising, the manuscript moves to the next step, step 2. In some cases, the Managing Editors may send the manuscript back to the author(s) for correction of gross errors and issues that could distract future reviewers.

Step 2. Starting a peer review process.  After the Managing Editors inform the Editors-in-Chief that the manuscript is going to a full external review.

The Managing Editors jointly select 4-5 referees, peer reviewers competent in the field of the submitted manuscript, and send them the manuscript upon their agreement. The referees can be selected from the pool of DPJ referees or outside of this pool (e.g., using Google Scholar, ERIC, and keywords of the manuscript) – in the latter case, referees must register on the DPJ site.  Please use the pre-designed invitation letter and guidelines for reviewers (available on the DPJ site: http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess) and send the invitations via the DPJ site.

At the same time, the Managing Editors should verify the presence of all components of the manuscript file and its metadata. The following components should be submitted both in the metadata and in the body of the main manuscript: Title, Abstract, Keywords, and References. In case of a discrepancy, please contact Ana Marjanovic-Shane, one of the DPJ Main Editors (anamshane@gmail.com). 

The referees will have about 4 weeks to provide their reviews to the Managing Editors (DPJ website will provide a reminder to the referees).

Step 3. The First Round Decision. The three Managing Editors make their decision informed by the Referees’ comments, recommendations, and judgments: (“Accept submission” – as is; “Revisions required” – minor revisions that will not require additional peer review; “Resubmit for review” – major revisions are needed with a new round of reviews; or “Decline Submission”).

The Managing Editors compose a response to the author(s), explaining the basis for their authorial judgments, informed by the external reviewers ' decision.

If they cannot make the decision, the editor-in-chief is assigned to make it (or the deputy of the editor-in-chief depending on circumstances (~1 week).

If the manuscript is rejected, please provide justifications for your decision to the authors.

If revisions are needed (minor or major), please consider the following guidelines for justifying your decision and helping the author to improve the manuscript, please:

a)      In a paragraph or so, provide a short summary of the main points of the manuscript in order for the authors to see how you read the manuscript.
b)      Reveal actual and potential strengths of the submitted manuscript and the reasons why the manuscript was not completely rejected;
c)      Identify the major problems with the current version of the manuscript and justify why you see them as problems and why they are major. If you refer to referees' comments, please justify their importance from your point of view (that may be different from the referees);
d)      Ask questions to the author(s) for clarification as needed;
e)      Reveal minor problematic areas of the manuscript;
f)      Make suggestions for improvements of the manuscript and to make the author's voice stronger;

Step 4. Publication of the Managing Editors' decision. The Managing Editors' decision needs to be recorded on the DPJ website. An email containing the first-round decision and the guidelines for revisions (if any) should be sent to the authors via the DPJ platform.

Additionally, the Managing Editors publish their decision on the DPJ Community Space along with referees' full comments and judgments (minus comments directed exclusively to the Managing Editors).

Knowing that your and the referees' judgments, analyses, guidelines, and suggestions will be published to the whole DPJ community, hopefully, this may lead to a more answerable, analytical, and collegial peer-review process.

IMPORTANT NOTES:
A.      It is OK to disagree with the referees' and DPJ community's judgments – their judgments serve only to inform yours, not to replace your judgment. You are the judge -- they are only your advisors. We can foresee a situation in which you may make a judgment contrary to all or a majority of the referees.
B.      Please do not be trapped by a stylistic taste in judging the manuscript such as manuscript being "one-sided", "monologic", "not balanced", "authoritarian," and so on (remember Bakhtin's characterization of Tolstoy's novel or short stories as "monologic" – it would not have prevented Bakhtin from publishing Tolstoy's "monologic" novels!). Your judgment should be guided by the manuscript's contributions to and potential to provoke important dialogues in the field.
C.      Complement your comments on the manuscript with examples from the manuscript and your analysis;
D.      Manuscripts ready to be published can not and do not have to be perfect, completely "weakness-free", from your point of view, but rather good enough for interesting public discussions;
E.      If you sense a paradigmatic disagreement or a paradigmatic "disgust" in yourself or in the referees, this is a very good sign that this manuscript is worth publication. New paradigms should not be censored but published, although they may highly disturb our tastes and senses.
F. In problematic situations that you cannot resolve yourselves completely, please seek help and/or advice from the Editors-in-Chief and, in some cases, even from the entire DPJ Editorial Board.
G. When one member of the Managing Editors Team resigns or stops responding to the MET’s communication, the remaining team members decide whether to call the DPJ Editorial Board for replacement of the retired MET member, or to work in a reduced size of just two members to continue the momentum.