Growing Inspiration to Work Towards Greater Transparency and Inclusion in Peer Review
By Ruth L. Healey and Alison Cook-Sather
Learning is an inherently emotional experience. The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) field has supported the development of intentional practices attentive to students’ emotional experiences of receiving feedback, but we do not always practice what we preach when attending to the emotions experienced by authors through the process of peer review (Cruz et al. 2024).
There can sometimes be a perceived disconnect between ensuring academic rigour, a key role of the peer review process, and attending to the emotional experience of receiving feedback. Many of you reading this will have experienced the “Reviewer 2” phenomenon in which one reviewer is highly critical of a submitted manuscript and the other reviewer(s) have affirmed the merit of the work. Reviewer 2 is often characterised as making inaccurate assumptions and being critical without accountability. Unreasonable feedback notwithstanding, detached and unsupportive feedback may come across as uncaring and decrease author engagement, motivation, and persistence.
As SoTL scholars we want not only to support authors enhancing their work for publication, but also to ensure that writing for publication is a positive learning experience. We wrote this paper to share the relational approach to engaging in peer review we have developed at the International Journal for Students as Partners. Through the promotion of inclusive and humane review practices that support the author(s) learning and growth, this approach draws on an interpretation of academic rigor as a process that “is not simply hard for the sake of being hard, but it is purposeful and transparent” (Brooks and McGurk 2022). Our offer of this approach would appear to be timely: since our original submission, two other pieces related to this theme have been published (Chick 2024; Cruz 2024). We hope this coincidence suggests a growing commitment to evolve approaches to peer review—a movement we very much support.
Read the TLI article here.
References
Brooks, Jamiella, and Julie McGurk. 2022. “Rigor as Inclusive Practice.” Teaching + Learning Lab, October 6, 2022. https://tll.mit.edu/rigor-as-inclusive-practice/.
Chick, Nancy. 2024. “‘Dear Author’: A Transparent SoTL Peer Review.” Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal, 17 (1). https://doi.org/10.26209/td2024vol17iss11800.
Cruz, Laura, Eileen Grodziak, and Hillary H. Steiner. 2024. “Practice What We Preach?: A Review of Journal Publishing Practices Related to Reflective Writing in SoTL.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 18 (1), Article 5. Available at: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2024.180105.
