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Three BERA journals announce Editors’ Choice Awards for 2022
Three of BERA’s journals, the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ), Review of Education and Curriculum Journal, have announced their annual Editors’ Choice Awards, recognising papers published in their 2022 volumes. BERA and the editors extend their warm congratulations to the authors of all winning, commended and shortlisted papers.
BERJ Editors’ Choice Award 2023
The editorial team of BERJ and BERA are delighted to announce the winner of the 2023 Editors’ Choice Award, which recognises papers published in the 2022 volume of the journal.
Five papers were nominated by the BERJ editorial board, and the editors selected the following winning article from the shortlist:
- Papadopoulou, M., & Sidorenko, E. (2022). Whose ‘voice’ is it anyway? The paradoxes of the participatory narrative. BERJ, 48(2), 354–370. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3770
The editors commented: ‘What we like about this paper is that it problematises rather “naïve” and optimistic ideas about children’s voice and participation in research. It does a good job, both in terms of raising difficult questions and connecting those questions with accounts of real-life research.’
The following four papers were shortlisted by the board, in addition to the winning paper:
- & (2022). Putting climate change at the heart of education: Is England’s strategy a placebo for policy? BERJ, 48(6), 1083–1101. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3816
- Hurry, J., Fridkin, L., & Holliman, A. J. (2022). Reading intervention at age 6: Long-term effects of Reading Recovery in the UK on qualifications and support at age 16. BERJ, 48(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3752
- , & (2022). Student mobility: Extent, impacts and predictors of a range of movement types for secondary school students in England. BERJ, 48(5), 1027–1048. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3807
Review of Education Editors’ Choice Award 2022
The Review of Education Editors’ Choice Award recognises the highest quality and most impactful articles published in the journal. The winning paper for the 2022 volume is:
- , , , & (2022). Effectiveness of online and blended learning from schools: A systematic review. Review of Education, 10(2), e3353. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3353
The editors said: ‘We have had some excellent, useful and widely read new articles in Review of Education this year. We selected this review of the evidence on online and blended learning because it is clearly of interest to readers, and a topical issue given recent lockdowns (and even perhaps teacher strikes). It reflects the origins and purpose of Review of Education – the piece is long and needs to be so in order to cover the field. This flexibility to publish longer articles is a key benefit of the journal. The review includes, as it ought, a consideration of the quality of each research report before synthesis, but also has a brief discussion of the practical difficulties of this and a comparison of different approaches.’
Curriculum Journal Editors’ Choice Award 2022
The annual Curriculum Journal Editors’ Choice Award, which recognises the best paper published in the journal in 2022, has been awarded to:
- (2022). Rethinking textbooks as active social agents in interpretivist research. Curriculum Journal, 33(4), 602–617. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.162
The editors commented: ‘It is a paper which sheds new or different light on how textbooks may be viewed in curriculum research, namely “as interactive subjects in the social world rather than simply as content carriers”; it further exemplifies, through two interpretivist research methodologies (symbolic interactionism and autoethnography), how “rethinking textbooks as active social agents in human life instead of repositories of information and ideologies” opens up possibilities of researching them, including how textbooks themselves may shape research.’
The editors would like to commend three further papers (in no particular order):
- , , & (2022). Low attainment in mathematics: An analysis of 60 years of policy discourse in England. Curriculum Journal, 33(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.128
The editors praised this paper ‘for its critique and careful tracing of policy discourse over a long period of time on a subject area which attracts considerable political attention often without due pedagogical rationalities’.
- , , & (2022). Cross-national comparisons of inquiry learning in secondary geography curricula. Curriculum Journal, 33(1), 42–60. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.126
This article was selected ‘for showing, through the case of inquiry learning in geography, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss powerful knowledge without simultaneously discussing powerful pedagogies, thus highlighting curriculum and pedagogy as entangled, albeit in different ways in the national curricula examined in the study, namely of Australia, China, England, Hong Kong, Singapore and the USA’.
- , , & (2022). Curriculum reform in Wales: Physical education teacher educators’ negotiation of policy positions. Curriculum Journal, 33(3), 495–514. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.149
The editors commended this article ‘for persuasively exploring how curriculum reform is embedded in multiple sites of curriculum making which influence/inform eventually what happens and changes in schools, but lies beyond them-in this case in teacher education’.