On Editing, Improvement and the Logic of Education

Abstract

This is my last editorial as editor-in-chief for Complicity. For the last four years I have worked hard with associate editors, Bill Doll and Donna Trueit, to try to overcome some of the limitations of scholarly publication (see Osberg, Doll & Trueit, 2008). We have tried to enlarge the space of the possible1 (Osberg, 2009) for scholarly engagement in the “field” (if such exists) of complexity and education by attempting to create a space of engagement which explicitly provokes creative thinking and debate on the complexities of education (Osberg, 2009). This is not to say such provocations were missing from this journal before our term of editorship began, but that we took it as our mission, and duty, not simply to try to maintain the journal as it was (its operations and ethos), but to “improve” it by working with all those concerned with the journal to make it somehow “greater” than it was. The status of a scholarly journal is, after all, primarily dependent on the work/s of all those who contribute articles towards it. Our dedication to “improving” the journal in this way is, perhaps, quite telling of our status as educators. Being an educator, can, after all, be seen as a professional life