Professional Development in Education

While professional development and learning in education has a long history of attending to technologies, recent developments in artificial intelligence including machine learning and large language models, along with sites for learning such as extended realities have created questions surrounding how such tools could be used to accelerate, advance, and improve professional processes and educational practices. There are important movements occurring in technology around ethical issues, policy differences for regulating technologies and protecting data privacy from various entities, as well as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) (https://sdgs.un.org/goals), which require sustainable uses of technologies to ensure our mutual survival.

During this important time, it is critical to leverage new frameworks for thinking about these issues that include the post human and the new/neo material (and related concepts such as agential realism), and the criticalities that can be overlaid to draw out the ways in which professional learning and development are complex tasks in a complex time. Rather than easy solutions or hero stories about professional learning with these technologies, we aim for critically complex thinking about the real challenges that face teachers and their students in practical settings.

The purpose of this special issue is to solicit manuscripts of about 8,000 words that are positioned at the nexus of advanced technologies, critically complex theories, and professional learning and development as defined by the usual scope of Professional Development in Education. We intend that published articles will thoughtfully consider potential uses of emerging technologies for workplace learning through a critical examination of relevant frameworks, lenses, and theories. We want to see robust engagement with these theories.

Possible topics include

• Designing professional learning in critically complex frames
• Planning for disruption, activism, and agency as part of professional learning
• Exploring tensions between improved efficiency and advancements made possible by emerging technologies and valuing acquired knowledge and expertise
• Building and understanding new theories and models for professional learning
• Non-linear approaches to designing and doing professional learning
• Critically complex ways of understanding the outcomes of professional learning
• Analyses of how attempts to understand professional learning in critically complex ways addresses historical and current issues of systemic injustice
• Sustainable (as broadly defined) professional learning with emerging technologies
• Policy analyses within and across countries or in line with UNSDGs related to emerging technology data ethics with implications for professional development.

Submission Process

The journal requires an initial submission of a structured abstract of 500 words by November 30, 2023. The structured abstract must include the following elements:

• Purpose
• Design/methodology/approach
• Findings
• Originality
• Implications for research/policy/practice

Successful abstracts will receive notification as soon as possible, and no later than December 31, 2023 and should be followed by the submission of a full paper by authors by February 28, 2024. The final versions of papers following peer-review and all necessary revisions are required by February 28th, 2025.

As soon as papers are accepted for publication, they will be published on-line with a full printed Special Issue being published in June 2025.

Articles will be 7,500- 8,000 words in length including references and will adhere to the aims and scope of the journal. Please read these before submitting at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rjie20

Contacts
Questions relating to the journal Professional Development in Education:

Alex Alexandrou - alex.pfe@btinternetcom
Mark Carver (Editorial Assistant) - [email protected]

Questions relating to the special issue:
Mary Rice - [email protected]
Rebecca Quintana -[email protected]

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article