Castellano • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • Français
Mathematics education research journal editors' statement
Between September 2020 and June 2021 a group of editors from various journals of mathematics education research met monthly to pursue an initiative to develop anti-racist editorial practices in Mathematics Education, convened by Jeffrey Choppin and Daniel Battey, and under Dorothy White as chair. One outcome of this initiative is the following statement. Readers who want to co-sign are invited to do so at the end.
Joint statement to reduce reviewer bias
We seek to cultivate mathematics education as a field of research that is inclusive of all its contributors. We are committed to the principle that the review process must practice anti-discrimination while it exercises its role in helping authors improve their production and helping editors ensure the scholarly excellence of published manuscripts. We acknowledge that discrimination is still present in reviews, on the basis of physical ability, class, culture, gender, race, religion, sex, language, and national origin sometimes directed to authors and other times to the research contexts authors examine. Presumptions of racial and cultural superiority in reviewing have in that way added to a chronic silencing of the voices of authors from historically oppressed groups in society at large. While such acts of discrimination may be unintentional, they affect the authors who receive them and eventually prevent our international community from becoming as inclusive as possible in its cadres of knowledge producers. This, in turn, limits the productivity, the quality, and consequently the prestige of our field of mathematics education. We aspire that the good intentions of reviewers be informed by the lived experience of those who have been discriminated against in reviewing. We must thus move toward a future in which we are all more cognizant of the effects of our words. We also promote thoughtfulness about who is cited in the papers our journal publishes and who reviewers promote as needing citation, to pay attention to research from regions and groups that are often underrepresented. We are all builders of a more inclusive field and also learners in this quest; thus, this commitment seeks to encourage learning and empathy rather than to dismiss individuals by attaching permanent labels to them. We appreciate the effort our reviewers put into their volunteer work and we continue to expect their assistance in identifying good research. Within this appreciative embrace, we encourage reviewers to face the reviewing task for our journal also considering the potential impact of the language they use in reviews and by learning about the lived experiences of scholars from groups that have been historically excluded in our field and about other contexts and frameworks for knowledge generation that may also contribute to enrich our scholarship.
[pdf]
2021 signatories:
2022 signatories:
Individuals who wish to co-sign this statement after its publication can do so using https://forms.gle/VfwWFGEPPS4gLg3t5.