Esteem is an online publication space for interviews and essays that promote dialogue between educators. In an effort to engage community by making talk and inquiry visible to a broad audience, Esteem builds a public archive of critical discourse where narrative snapshots of inquiry and learning are documented and shared.

Guiding Questions:

• How can educators (teachers, Masters and Doctoral students) use the inquiry process to engage in meaningful and active learning experiences outside of the classroom environment?
• What are the topics and questions that educators would like to pursue?
• How does the interview process promote learning and the sharing of resources?
• How can an online publication space contribute to the overall learning of a growing community of educators?
• What can we learn from this process about the direction university-based schools of education will need to take in the future? How can schools of education rethink the curriculum on the Masters and Doctoral level to promote active learning, differentiation, and respect for adult students and educators?

Theoretical framework

Cochran-Smith & Lytle (2009) have established inquiry as a stance that challenges the typical educational model; however, despite a body of literature that recognizes the value of practitioner inquiry, there are few venues for learners to document and share narrative acts of learning. When documented as multimodal artifacts of learning, these interviews build “rich intertextual landscapes” (Ranker, 2008) that position the learner and the expert as both speakers and listeners engaged in a mutual conversation.  Critical feminism served as the basis for the Esteem publication model. By sharing and documenting dialogues between members of communities that have typically labelled “students” as less powerful  than “experts,” and by analyzing and questioning those labels and their roles within the narrative discourses represented in the documented interviews, this publication draws upon the work of those who are rethinking the roles of learners in educational spaces.

Esteem Interviews:

In emulation of the long-form interviews of classic literary and arts publications such as The Paris Review, BOMB, and Interview Magazine, Esteem seeks interviews that shed light on the process of creation in the field of education. If you are interested in sending in a submission, please see our Submissions page.

Esteem Essays:

We are interested in publishing essays that present our readers with provocative new ideas. These can range from short essays that pose a single question (500-1000 words), to academic essays (up to 3,000 words) that complicate or rethink educational concepts.

*Note: These essays can be multimodal, as the online format of this journal allows us to present ideas in ways traditional academic research publications can not.

If you are interested in sending in an essay submission, please send an email to df2145@tc.columbia.edu.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.