Thinking about what has been ‘missing’ in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE) and perhaps the field more generally

Abstract

As part of our 50 years “celebration” of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE), we thought it may be timely to think about what is, or has been, missing from the journal and, possibly, the “field” of teacher education over the past 50 years. To that end, you will see in this issue a paper, which is an edited “conversation” between scholars who have had an interest in the journal and the field of teacher education on the topic of what is, or has been, missing in APJTE and/or the “field.” We want to focus on the “missing” in this issue, not to highlight any deficiencies in past or present practices, but instead, to stimulate some discussion about what might eventuate in the next 50 years – to think about what might be “missing” 50 years hence. Below, we briefly discuss our initial orientation to the “missing” and the invited conversation piece, and then we introduce the other papers in the issue. When planning this issue as part of the 50-year celebration of APJTE, the question of what is missing arose in our discussion; we were interested in how we might frame this problem. It seems that the problem of the “missing,” on reflection, is at once both practical and philosophical. For example, from a practical point of view one can imagine that all of the authors whose papers have been submitted, but rejected, may read the responses to the question of the “missing” with some interest (paradoxically, one of the editors [Heimans] had the experience of having a submission rejected in APJTE!). More philosophically, one may wonder about the following: 1. what is “present”; 2. what is “missing,” or, seen another way, an “absent presence”; and 3. what is an “absent absence”to draw lightly on work by John Law (2004). Roughly these three categories focus our attention on 1. what is “in” the journal/field; 2. what is “out,” but may have been in given different conditions (e.g., different editors, different year of submission – thinking about the 50-year span and the faddishness of education practice and education research); and 3. what is not even thinkable as a possibility of being “in.” If we use Law’s typology, we can begin with the seemingly straightforward question about “What is ‘in’?.” A logical place to start with this is to look at the aims and scope of the journal – what is “in” must surely fall within these descriptors. However, such descriptors of desirable content are still subject to the processes of double-blind review and decision-making by editors. It is hard (perhaps impossible) to describe with any degree of accuracy the actual parameters of the aims and scope of a journal, and what does and does not fit within these – there is, perhaps, some desirable flexibility here. This leads us to the invited “conversation” piece in this issue. The aim of the invited “conversation” is not to try to reflect on the parameters ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 50, NO. 3, 229–232 https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2022.2079174