Bjorn Nordtveit completes 10 years as Editor of CER

For the past 10 years, the Comparative Education Review (CER) has been based at the Center for International Education in the College of Education at UMass Amherst with Bjorn Nordtveit as its editor.  With the publication of the November 2023 issue, the editorship will move to a new team of editors that will be led by co-editors Dr. tavis d. jules at Loyola University Chicago and Dr. Florin D. Salajan at North Dakota State University.

 

In his farewell editorial to be published in the November 2023 issue Bjorn reflects on his experience. He begins the editorial by saying: It was a warm summer day in 2013 when the editor of the Comparative Education Review (CER), Professor David Post, met the incoming team in Amherst. The aim of that initial meeting was to plan the transition of the Journal, and to discuss its many operational features.*

 

And at the end of the editorial, he says: It is a warm summer day in 2023 in Amherst, and a new team is taking over the Journal we have been stewarding for ten years. In our initial proposal, we stated that the Journal’s essential mission will be to support and nourish:

 

  • continued high quality scholarship in comparative and international education;
  • a dynamic interface among research, policy and practice; and
  • increasing engagement and participation from diverse constituencies

 

I am proud that together we have achieved this mission.

 

Bjorn praised the invaluable contributions of the teams of co-editors including two faculty members from CIE/IE. [Pictured: editorial team for 2013 to 2018]

 

Bjorn also lauded the work of the ten CIE/IE graduate students who served in various capacities as managing editors over the decade.

 

 

 

In the editorial, Bjorn reflects on five challenges during the past decade that have been the subject of a rich and diverse intellectual dialogue in the pages of the CER:

 

  • Gradual transition from a knowledge economy to an artificial-intelligence-supported economy.
  • Educational delivery and governance mechanism are increasingly online and remote; a process accelerated by the Coronavirus pandemic.
  • Political landscapes impacting education with memory laws that are reconstruing historical events to fit a supremacist narrative in many parts of the world.
  • Civil protests oft-framed within – or with reference to – Black Lives Matter, to counter supremacist discourses.
  • Emergence of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch characterized by significant human destruction of Earth's geology and ecosystems.

 

Hosting the CER during the past decade has provided invaluable professional development opportunities for UMass graduate students hoping to publish their own research.  Graduate students have been introduced to the inner workings of a professional journal and learned how articles are selected, what criteria are used in selection, and what editorial standards are expected of contributors.  Both students and faculty also became more active in CIES, the professional society that hosts the journal CER. [7-23]

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*Italicized sections are quotations from the forthcoming editorial