About the Author(s)


Elizabeth Henning Email symbol
Centre for Education Practice Research, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

Citation


Henning, E., 2019, ‘Editorial’, South African Journal of Childhood Education 9(1), a829. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajce.v9i1.829

Editorial

Editorial

Elizabeth Henning

Copyright: © 2019. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

How does a research journal remain or become impactful?

Most editors will respond to this question very simply: the articles must make an impact. In the academic world, impact is easily measured by citations. In the world of practice, the impact of a journal can hardly be gauged. As the founding editor of the South African Journal of Childhood Education (SAJCE), I have, of course, always wished for impact to be mirrored in the metrics of the Web of Science and Scopus and other systems that capture academic use of the articles we publish1. But, more than that, I have wished for the articles to be written by aspiring authors who are new to the academy and its conventions. In 2020, I hope that the total authorship of the journal in its first decade will show how we have been able to scaffold some part of new authors’ journeys to become published writers in a respected journal.

For their support in sponsoring half of the page- and handling fees for South African authors, I thank the Department of Higher Education and Training, through funding from the European Union, for their generous financial support from 2017–2019. This contribution made it possible to publish with a reliable publishing house on open science.

The highlight of this year has been the articles that were published in the special collections. With leading researchers in South Africa and elsewhere as guest editors, these editors have been able to harvest outstanding contributions for our rolling publications in Volume 9.

Lilli Pretorius and Sarah Murray put together a group of articles with fine nuances and a powerful editorial in the collection entitled Reducing inequalities in and through literacy in the early years of schooling. Retha van Niekerk did likewise with her editing of the Teaching and learning: Mathematics, science, design, technology in the early years collection. The special collection about teacher education for the primary school and the perennial problem of practice, with Sonja Brink, Reetta Niemi and Anni Loukomies as guest editors, is continuing in Volume 10 in 2020.

These collections have mirrored what the journal aims to achieve – a greater awareness of what counts as knowledge-making about learning and development in the childhood years. According to these three sets of guest editors, what counts is good scientific practice about important topics. We need much more of such social science. We simply do not know enough about children’s adaptive competence in this crucial phase of life when so much groundwork is laid for future learning and evolvement as a human. For the looming ‘post-human’ era, we need to find out much more about young humans’ capabilities in the face of artificial intelligence and its machine learning and algorithms.

Footnote

1. See the ‘News’ section on the journal’s website for indices where the SAJCE is listed.



Crossref Citations

No related citations found.