Developing a Statement of Ethics for a Top-Ranked Education Journal: An Interview with Dr. Doris Santoro by Logan Rutten

In Winter 2019, the American Journal of Education (AJE) published a statement of ethics to guide the work of its editors, reviewers, and contributors. The statement is informed by the principles of integrity, generativity, respect for human dignity and diversity, transparency, and truthfulness. Each principle is defined and then described in relation to the roles of editor, reviewer, and manuscript author. At a recent joint meeting of the AJE senior editorial board and the board of the student-run AJE Forum, the final version of the statement was presented. I became curious about the statement’s impetus and development process. As the content committee chair of the student editorial board, I wondered how the journal’s ethics statement might inform the production and review of articles for the AJE Forum. In order to learn more, I reached out to Dr. Doris Santoro, who chaired the committee that developed the statement. In February 2019, Dr. Santoro graciously shared some of her time to speak with me about the ethics statement. In this article, I present lightly edited highlights of our conversation to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the committee’s work.

Dr. Doris Santoro is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Education Department at Bowdoin College, a liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine. She is a philosopher of education who also serves as a Senior Associate Editor with the American Journal of Education (AJE). Dr. Santoro describes herself as a teacher educator whose research focus is “the ethics of teaching and teachers’ moral concerns about their work.” Given her areas of expertise, in 2018, Dr. Gerald LeTendre (co-editor of AJE with Dr. Dana Mitra) asked her to facilitate the work of an ad hoc committee he had convened for the purpose of developing a statement of ethics for the journal. Members of the team included senior associate editors of AJE as well as members of the AJE Forum student editorial board. Dr. Santoro reflected on the importance of doctoral students being part of the process. She noted, “One of the things that distinguishes AJE from other top journals in education is that it has a student board, so there’s a function of mentoring and scholar development that is distinct to the purposes of AJE that we also wanted to capture.” According to Dr. Santoro, Dr. LeTendre’s charge to the committee was that the statement was not meant to be a detailed decision tree addressing possible ethics violations, such as how to handle an allegation of plagiarism. Instead, the statement was to set out the ethical principles guiding the work of editors, reviewers, and contributors to AJE. Accordingly, the committee began its work by discussing Dr. LeTendre’s charge and reflecting on the need for a statement of ethics.

I asked Dr. Santoro why the statement of ethics needed to be written at all. In her understanding, “There were more questions coming up when [AJE’s reviewers were] looking at manuscripts in terms of seeing a manuscript that they’d felt like they’d seen before, or seeing a manuscript that seemed to be a vehicle primarily for self-citation, or even ways in which questions were raised about the kinds of feedback that reviewers were giving.” While some of these are perennial questions faced by journal editors, according to Dr. Santoro, “What was new was that there [have been] more and more international submissions coming in, and there were questions about what constitutes a reasonable submission to the journal. This was one of the principles we chose to guide us: to be as plain-spoken and straightforward as possible for an international audience, not using terms that might work well with a North American or English-speaking audience but that when translated might cause confusion.” This approach sets AJE apart from other journals, which Dr. Santoro said sometimes have multi-page statements that are more procedural than principled. Dr. Santoro offered the term “conflict of interest” as an instance of a word for which the committee provided more explicit detail in the statement by explaining what it means for reviewers as well as for authors. Reviewers are to declare when they feel they are unable to review a piece in an unbiased manner, while authors are to declare funding sources or other financial interests related to their work.

I asked about the process for developing the statement. Dr. Santoro said that she had chaired the committee but that the process was a highly collaborative one. No single person was the primary author of the statement. The committee members met on five occasions over the course of six months using Zoom video conferencing software, and they represented institutions across the United States. The committee’s diversity was a significant asset for accomplishing its charge. According to Dr. Santoro, “Another piece that was really important was that folks were coming from different research traditions into the conversation. One of the things that guided us was the fact that AJE is not a disciplinary-specific journal, and we wanted to honor the multiple kinds of submissions so that [evaluation] is based on the criteria relevant to the kind of work, not [the criteria of a] single methodology or perspective that would fare better in this ethical schema.” This approach is consistent with AJE’s author guidelines, which seek a wide variety of submissions including original research, theoretical or philosophical pieces, research syntheses, and other papers that blend research with policy and practice.

After its initial discussion of its charge, the committee reviewed existing statements of ethics from other journals. They met to talk about what they appreciated most about the samples as well as what they thought were aspects they wanted to include in AJE’s statement. They began discussing what the principles would be and how they would be defined. Next, they considered what each of the principles might mean in practice for each stakeholder in the submission, review, and publication processes. This process generated the final document published by AJE.

“I think it’s a beautiful statement, and I hope it can be a model for other organizations that have review processes. I would love for it to be in the public domain.”

Dr. Santoro

I asked Dr. Santoro whether there were any principles or issues that provoked more discussion than others during the committee’s discussions. She noted that the committee “frequently turned to considerations about how to be as clear as possible in cross-cultural situations.” Another interesting discussion was what the principles mean in practice for reviewers. Ideally, the statement seeks reviewers who “treat the work as an end in itself and not say, ‘Well, you didn’t cite me,’ or ‘I have a different perspective on this whole realm of inquiry.’” In relation to these kinds of ethical pitfalls for reviewers, I mentioned that I was particularly appreciative of the value of respect for human dignity and diversity. Dr. Santoro said that there was much discussion of ideological, methodological, and disciplinary traditions that shape research, in addition to culture and language. The principles of human dignity and integrity are also intended to provide guidance to reviewers, acknowledging the worth of research agendas that may not align with reviewers’ own perspectives. However, the principles dig deeper than openness to differing perspectives. According to Dr. Santoro, the value of dignity and diversity was “a way to retain as much openness as possible while also saying that…human beings are respected within the research. If the research itself suggests a lack of respect for the dignity and value of human life, then that is grounds to look more critically or to raise serious questions about it. [The value of respect] is about the author and also about the content.”

I concluded my interview with Dr. Santoro by asking for any additional reflections she wanted to share about the statement of ethics. She said, “I think our biggest conversations were about who are the stakeholders that we need to address. In a post-truth era, it’s interesting that our description of truthfulness didn’t cause more of a kerfuffle, but I like the idea of aiming to offer the most accurate information available and addressing errors when necessary. It’s really important to recognize our fallibility.” The committee’s work on truthfulness is reflected in the statement, which addresses truthfulness not only in terms of authors submitting original scholarship with accurate information but also in terms of editors’ and reviewers’ duty to think about their expertise and ability to provide timely, thorough, and transparent feedback to authors. Dr. Santoro concluded, “I’m delighted with the outcome. I think it’s a beautiful statement, and I hope it can be a model for other organizations that have review processes. I would love for it to be in the public domain.”

The AJE statement of ethics is freely available for the public to read on the website of the American Journal of Education. The statement provides a plain-language and transparent foundation for AJE’s continued work. As noted in this article, graduate students were involved throughout the development and publicization of the statement. In the coming months, the AJE Forum and student editorial board will be considering how the statement of ethics will shape the publications on ajeforum.com. The student editorial board wishes to extend special appreciation to Dr. Doris Santoro, Dr. Gerald LeTendre, Dr. Dana Mitra, and Dr. Mindy Kornhaber for their support and mentoring during this project.

Logan Rutten is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Supervision at Penn State University. A classicist and musician, he has taught grades K-12 in public, charter, and cyber schools. Logan’s current research examines the pedagogy of teacher inquiry, preservice teachers’ motivations, shared expertise and teacher learning in school-university partnerships, and the democratic context for schooling. He earned a B.A. at Concordia College and an M.Ed. from Penn State