This is the first update on progress in developing the on-line journal RACE Online. To receive future issues of this update by email you will have to register. Registration involves no cost or other obligation on your part and you will be able to cancel at any time.
In this issue:
In the couple of weeks since the first announcement of RACE Online went live on the Internet the site has received 856 hits from 294 individuals.
The first formal call for papers has yet to be made but spontaneous informal proposals for articles have already been received in response to the first announcement.
Emails to the Editors so far have been positive, even enthusiastic. There have as yet been no negative or critical responses but, as stressed in the first announcement, critical comment will be very welcome.
The Editors already welcome the generous help in widening awareness of RACE Online to wider audiences, following the first announcement.
Patrick Reilly, President of the Inter-American Conductive Education Association, has forwarded the first announcement to four-hundred correspondents concerned with Conductive Education in the Americas.
Hilary Gray will feature RACE Online in the next issue of the Bulletin of the British and East European Psychology Group, that goes out to three-hundred psychology departments in Eastern and Central Europe, a further hundred in the United Kingdom and some in the United States too.
Peter Limbrick has republished the first announcement on the Interconnections Electronic Bulletin.
Max Tomlinson from the Fulham Medical Centre is forwarding the first announcement to everyone on his database.
László Szögetski has announced RACE Online on the forum of Konduktív Pedagógiai Elektronikus Magazin.
Others have also forwarded this first announcement to contacts on their own personal data bases.
Everyone’s help is welcome. You can pass on the journal’s website through http://race-journal.org/send-friend.html
Understanding the practice and theory of Conductive Education invokes many academic disciplines, history, philosophy and other liberal studies as well as educational, social and medical sciences. Conductive studies are therefore inevitably multidisciplinary, with necessary and legitimate contributions to be made by a wide range of disciplines. It is anticipated that RACE Online will continue as a multidisciplinary and multinational journal, as established by the print edition. It is also anticipated that its new status as a refereed journal will offer incentive for a growing number of academics to examine this fascinating and heuristic system, for its more general as well as its immediate implications. Academics, scholars and scientists experienced in publishing in their own fields will meet no novel problem in writing for RACE Online.
Conductive practice, on the other hand, is essentially uni-disciplinary, dependent upon conductors. The conductor profession has as yet made little contribution to the academic study of its own field. It is vital for the well-being of Conductive Education in future years that this situation should change, especially with regard to investigating conductors’ core expertise in conductive pedagogy and conduction itself. RACE Online is committed to encouraging the furtherance of the conductor profession in this respect, though appreciating that it is far from easy to begin academic research and writing if one has never done such a thing before.
The Editors of RACE Online will therefore be particularly happy to discuss proposals for possible articles from conductors working in settings around the world, and ready to offer advice and guidance as appropriate.
In the meantime, here are two immediate suggestions for conductors looking for a hand-up in starting formal academic publication. There may well be others.
First, you might ask an academic who is already an experienced researcher and mentor to collaborate in what you are trying to do.
Secondly, a growing number of conductors around the world have already undertaken masterates or further professional training in different countries and in different academic disciplines, part-requirement for which has been a supervised dissertation project that might be reworked and submitted as a journal article or at least a shorter ‘annotation’. You might try doing this yourself – or you could approach your former tutor to see whether some further mentoring might be available in return for joint authorship, that is the tutor’s name at the top of the article alongside the conductor’s.
Either approach is vastly facilitated by modern electronic communication – successful academic collaboration on such small-scale projects being often possible nowadays even if the collaborators are by now in different countries.
Initial approach to a potential academic collaborator might be eased if it is made clear from the outset that the proposed publication is to be submitted to a refereed journal that is international in scope.
In response to anxious enquiries, the Editors wish to reaffirm that the print edition of Recent Advances in Conductive Education will continue to appear in print alongside RACE Online.
They would like to emphasise that the on-line edition will not be simply an electronic version of the print edition ‘put on the Internet’. On the contrary, the print edition will provide a paper version of what is published on the Internet for individuals and institutions requiring this service for whatever reason. This is an important distinction in the growing field of on-line publication.
The Editors regret that they will be unable to provide the print edition free of charge.
The forthcoming issue of Recent Advances in Conductive Education, the last to be published solely as a paper edition, will appear at the end of the year.
RACE Online will from time to time announce academic conferences that feature Conductive Education.
An international conference to mark the twentieth anniversary of Tsad Kadima will be held in Tel-Aviv on 10-11 December 2007. The conference’s preliminary announcement can be seen at three sites:
http://www.myreg.co.il/tsad-kadima/ (in English and Hebrew)
http://www.tsadkadima.org.il/ (in Hebrew)
http://www.tsadkadima.co.il/ (in English)
The full conference programme, along with booking and other practical details, will be published on these sites very soon.
RACE Online Update will appear regularly until publication of the first issue of RACE Online itself, in June 2008. Register to receive future updates via email.
The Editors