The Liberal Arts Endeavor: Valuing Peer Review

The Inaugural Reviewer of the Year Award

Providing conscientious and helpful peer review for scholarship under consideration for publication is one of the most important and least recognized forms of scholarly engagement. Hidden behind "blind" review processes or gestured to in passing on annual activity reports, the vital work of peer review too often goes unnoticed and remains undervalued. It would not, however, be an understatement to say that peer review is the very soil from which high quality scholarship grows, the place where ideas are refined and enhanced, revised and rendered more poignant, accessible, and capable of energizing enduring change. When the thoughtful, difficult, and complex practices of peer review go unrecognized, they languish. It becomes more difficult for editors to find willing reviewers, more frustrating to engage in the process of review, and more challenging for us to publish generative and compelling ideas.

We have sought here at the Journal of General Education to seed the peer review process with "thick collegiality"¹ and ethical imagination so that the ideas we publish benefit from the wisdom, helpfulness, and generosity of those who have graciously agreed to review for us. In this we follow in the spirit of the Public Philosophy Journal, with its formative peer review process, a "structured form of peer engagement rooted in trust and a shared commitment to improving the work through candid and collegial feedback."² Now we are pleased to announce the creation of a new Reviewer of the Year Award to recognize the vital and important work of peer review in our journal.

Specifically, the Award recognizes a reviewer who:

1. 1.

   Provides quality feedback to the authors and editors. That is, the feedback is:

   1. (a). Knowledgeable about the content

   2. (b). Open and resourceful

   3. (c). Collegial and kind

2. 2. Provides feedback that has a strong, positive impact on the publication(s),

3. 3. Completes reviews on time or early, and

4. 4. Has completed multiple reviews for the journal (if applicable).

The Awardee is selected by the JGE editorial team through an internal evaluation process.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of JGE's inaugural Reviewer of the Year Award is Dr. Vicki L. Reitenauer from Portland State University. Dr. Reitenauer teaches in PSU's general education program, University Studies,³ and their women's studies program. Dr. Reitenauer's review exemplified the arts of liberty our journal champions: she was kind, generous, and constructive, and her feedback improved the manuscript under review. We should not be surprised at the quality of Dr. Reitenauer's review as her website biography attests that she "helps students use reflective thinking and writing in the service of working collaboratively with community organizations to make positive change."⁴ This is the sort of person and work Dr. Reitenauer offers daily "in order to bring our best selves to our communities."⁵ At JGE, we are grateful for Dr. Reitenauer's conscientious work and her ongoing engagement with the journal. She has already conducted another exemplary review for us, with that article now undergoing revisions.

Dr. Reitenauer has received a plaque, pictured below, to recognize her excellent work for our scholarly community. The wood is from a black cherry tree from the front yard of our managing editor, Bethany Laursen: cut, milled, planed, and finished by her with help from others.⁶ It symbolizes that our scholarly community grows by personal effort joined with histories that stretch before and beyond us.

Figure 1.

The metal plate reads, "The Journal of General Education Hereby Recognizes Vicki Reitenauer As Its Inaugural Reviewer of the Year 2019."

Summary of Articles in This Issue

We are pleased to present eleven strong articles in this double issue.

1. 1. Casey Ozaki, Deborah Worley, Emily Cherry, and Andrea Kehn report research results showing that Gale and Bond's (2005) four-part assessment framework can be a helpful, generalizable framework for student assessment across many creative arts fields, including theater, music, art and design, and dance.

2. 2. Karin Lundberg offers a critical reflection on how most approaches to general...