Letter From the Editor

Abstract

It has been a great pleasure and highlight of my career to have edited the Journal of Experiential Education for the past six years. I have been proud to serve the experiential education community in this capacity and could not have done it without a lot of help, support, and collegiality: the team of associate editors who dutifully and capably managed many submissions; Rob Smariga and Sherry Bagley, the respective AEE Executive Directors during my term; SAGE’s managing and producing editors in the U.S. and India; the JEE’s trusted editorial board; and the reviewers who volunteered to vet countless submissions. I’m grateful to all of you. Finally, it is an honor to stand on the shoulders of my predecessors, the former editors – the JEE is where it is today because of you. In this final editorial letter, I’d like to leave some parting thoughts about how I believe the JEE can steward knowledge going forward, which of course depends on the quality of its submissions. This will be the focus of my brief comments. When I started my career in the field as a budding practitioner nearly 30 years ago, the JEE had a very different feel, format, and emphasis. In the U.S., where I worked in secondary-level public education, it was the heady Clinton era of the 1990s, when experiential education was flush with money from federal service learning grants to corporate adventure programming. This was an exciting time to come of age as an experiential educator. Leaders in the field were deeply engaged with large-scale education reform, advanced techniques in practice, and theoretical innovation. At the time my work was most closely related to outdoor education and national service; the newly-formed Corporation for National Service, my main funder, was led by the great Harris Wofford, who as a Senator was instrumental in Outward Bound’s formation in the U.S. (Miner & Boldt, 2002). When I heard Wofford speak at a meeting I felt like I was part of a movement and part of history! The JEE’s content reflected these emphases and this legacy. Looking at the journal’s issues from that period, it also appears that the JEE was more closely tied to the concerns of the immediate stakeholders of its parent organization, the Association for Experiential Education. Since then, funding has become more scarce, school reform turned into big business, and researchers – following the school accountability schemes of the early 2000s – sought mainstream recognition by speaking to institutional priorities rather than aiming at transformational change, an important and understandable priority at the time. Consequently, investigators followed experiential education into new forms of practice and disciplinary contexts even as Editorial