Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 3 (1) 2006 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci Editor’s notes on issue 3 (1) 2006 Noel Gough University of Canberra, Australia Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (TCI) seeks to contribute to the internationalisation of curriculum studies by providing a site for transnational scholarly conversations – a space in which scholars from different nations can collaborate and converse as they reframe and decentre their own knowledge traditions and negotiate trust in each other’s contributions to their collective work. Like its parent organisation, the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS), TCI exists to support a worldwide – but not uniform – field of curriculum studies. The IAACS’s mission statement reminds us that: at this historical moment and for the foreseeable future, curriculum inquiry occurs within national borders, often informed by governmental policies and priorities, responsive to national situations. Curriculum study is, therefore, nationally distinctive. The founders of the IAACS do not dream of a worldwide field of curriculum studies mirroring the standardization and uniformity the larger phenomenon of globalization threatens (http://iaacs.levinux.org). Thus, a necessary step in the internationalisation of curriculum studies is to represent and perform our nationally distinctive approaches to curriculum inquiry in ways that authentically demonstrate their localness. This is precisely what Lyn Yates provides in the paper that leads this issue. Her response to the question, ‘What can schools do?’ is framed explicitly by her location as an Australian curriculum scholar. It implicitly invites curriculum scholars elsewhere to consider how her question might be answered in their own locations. For example, although Mei Wu Hoyt does not directly address the question ‘What can schools do?’ in the People’s Republic of China, her essay in this issue makes it quite clear that Chinese curriculum scholars would answer that question differently – and also that it would have been answered differently at different times during the eighty-seven years since John Dewey first visited China. I would certainly welcome manuscripts from curriculum scholars elsewhere in the world that offer perspectives on what schools can do in their particular nations. I should say too that Yates’ inaugural lecture as Foundation Professor of Curriculum at the University of Melbourne is itself an event of some considerable significance in the history of Australian curriculum studies. Established in 1853, the University of Melbourne is Australia’s second oldest university and arguably the most prestigious of all Australian universities that have a Faculty or School of Education. As an alumnus of that university myself, I would have preferred that its recognition of curriculum studies as a discipline meriting the establishment of a Chair might have taken less than 153 years – but better late than never! I will also use these notes as an opportunity to remind readers that TCI a site both for curriculum inquiry and for inquiry into the ways that electronic publishing procedures facilitate and/or constrain inclusive knowledge work in global virtual spaces. Noel Gough: Editor’s notes on issue 3 (1) 2006 Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 3 (1) 2006 http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci 27 One of the ways in which we try to produce such conversations is to keep TCI’s editorial policies and procedures flexible and refrain from imposing arbitrary standards and styles. For example, TCI does not have a fixed publication schedule: articles and book/media reviews will be published when they are accepted for publication. Each issue will normally consist of one article and/or one book/media review but (as was the case with volume 1, issue 1) articles that complement one another will be reviewed together and, if accepted, published as a single issue. We are also flexible in matters of layout and style. If authors go to the trouble of formatting their articles in a particular way then we will not change them to fit our templates. Similarly, we do not prescribe a single citation style. Authors are free to use whatever style they see as most appropriate for their work, provided that they use a style consistently and provide all of the bibliographic information we require. TCI’s review policies and procedures are also flexible. For example, although all articles published in TCI are peer reviewed, they are not necessarily ‘blind’ reviews. Authors may choose to anonymise their manuscripts, and the editors will respect their choice, but we do not impose anonymity on authors. Normally, each manuscript is reviewed by at least three referees, two of whom (in most cases) will be of different nationalities from the author(s) and from each other. In addition, the Editor may assign a consulting editor to liaise with the referees and the Editor in reaching a decision about publication. Each referee’s signed review is circulated to the other referees. My experience, like that of many other journal editors, is that signed reviews are usually of a higher quality than unsigned reviews. However, the names of referees are not divulged to authors of rejected manuscripts. At the Editor’s discretion, manuscripts accepted for publication may be published together with some or all of the referees’ comments and the author’s response. I have chosen not to do so in this issue, chiefly because most of the reviewers’ comments on Hoyt’s initial paper were of a technical nature and have been addressed to my satisfaction in the revised version. I wish to thank Mei Wu Hoyt for her patience, and also thank the three reviewers (from Canada, the People’s Republic of China, and Korea) for their thoughtful comments and recommendations.