Founded in 2013, Texas Education Review (TxEd) is operated by graduate students in the College of Education. TxEd is a web-based, open access peer-reviewed academic journal that does not require fees for authors to publish their work.
TxEd’s mission is to publish works by graduate students, academics, and practitioners across the country, focusing on education policy and related issues with non-exclusive preference given to works that focus on issues in or affecting Texas. “The journal seeks to publish academically rigorous work and to provide graduate students with hands-on experience in academic writing, peer review, editing, and publishing, and provide research that will be valuable to educators,” says Catherine Hartman, editorial board member and former managing editor.
The Application Process
TxEd’s editorial board is composed of doctoral students from across the College of Education. The journal publishes issues biannually through open call submissions and critical forums. Open call pieces are editorials or manuscripts that anyone can submit through an online system located on the website.
Critical forums are spaces within each issue curated by the editorial board. For each forum, an individual editor is responsible for identifying a significant problem or issue related to education that is of interest to them. Past forums include immigrant student literacy in language arts classrooms, physical activity programs in schools, and the presence of South Asian Americans in higher education. The editor will then invite contributing authors who they believe have an important perspective on the topic––such as policymakers, researchers, practitioners, or students––to contribute a manuscript or editorial to their critical forum.
The Selection Process
All open call and critical forum pieces undergo a double-blind peer review, in which they are reviewed and approved by two anonymized editorial board members. TxEd editors provide comments directly on submitted manuscripts and editorials, and complete a rubric in which they provide additional critical feedback in case a piece must be revised and resubmitted.
“Few graduate students actually get a chance to participate in the process, let alone review pieces for an academic journal,” says Hartman, “and TxEd provides this chance. Many editorial board members aspire to academic positions after graduating, and having the opportunity to learn how to provide constructive feedback allows them to improve their writing and to gain insight into the peer review process.”
