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  • Radical Teacher is going online
  • Richard Ohmann

Radical Teacher has decided to become an “open access” on-line magazine by 2015. By “open access” we mean that we will not require people to pay a subscription fee. In our new on-line incarnation, we will continue to be a journal that is peer-reviewed, literate, and focused on the politics, practices, and aspirations of education at every level. We believe that in this way we can better fulfill our role in the movement for equal access to a democratic education. We hope that our readers will also see this decision as an important step toward realizing Radical Teacher’s goal, as enunciated on our masthead, of being a socialist, feminist, anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.

—The Radical Teacher Collective

Like many periodicals—academic, political, commercial—Radical Teacher has been squeezed by the forces bearing in on print publication. Subscription income is down, costs are up. But it is not quite as simple as that. When we began, in 1975, we were part of a broad movement that included civil rights and antiwar activists, new wave feminists, the incipient gay and lesbian uprising, and so on. These political groups all had academic presences by 1975, and a magazine that offered a forum for talk about democratic pedagogies, texts by forgotten or marginalized peoples, and struggles over curriculum and work conditions could bring together a readership with a strong sense of the liberatory commitments that held it together. We gathered a group of energetic authors, subscribers, and editors. We put out RT on the cheap, with our own unpaid labor except for the printing itself.

Those conditions are gone, though lots more left and feminist people teach in schools and universities now than 35 years ago, and topics, kinds of teaching, and scholarly fields that came into education then are solidly established—if under attack politically and economically, as always. As an on-line open access magazine, we still expect to play an active part in that continuing ferment, and also speak to new entrants into education through a medium with which they [End Page 3] are familiar. There will of course be losses: e.g., the heft, mobility, design, and permanence of a printed magazine, although we will make sure to offer a “print on demand” option for all issues of the magazine that we produce.

But I am excited about possible gains, too, that may come after we begin putting our issues up on the web. Quick access to the conversation in RT is the most obvious. Readers will be able to browse or read each new issue, immediately--not just a few hundred paid subscribers, but a much larger group of allies and political affines. I hope they will be able to comment, object, describe their own parallel work, tell teaching stories, say how they are struggling in what will surely continue to be bad times for teachers and students. That would make RT a cumulative political process, not just a three times yearly production. I like the prospect. I hope you will join us, and bring your friends and comrades to the conversation. [End Page 4]

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