Submit to Radical Teacher

Manuscript Submissions

We invite you to correspond with us in advance of sending manuscripts. If you have an idea for a possible article, you can ask whether it seems suitable for RT, and if so, how it might best be developed. If you are farther along in your thinking and writing, you can send the editor a one-page proposal, to be circulated to a few board members for reactions. Or if you prefer, send your manuscript, without these preliminaries. All mss. will receive full reviews (see below) unless they don't fit Radical Teacher's editorial policies and limits. Correspondence, proposals, and manuscripts should go to Richard Ohmann, preferably electronically: manuscripts@radicalteacher.org. Otherwise, send five copies of your ms. with appropriate return postage to Linda Dittmar, 31 Brewster St, Cambridge, MA 02138 or to Frinde Maher, 67 May St., Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 .

Books for review should be sent to Sarah Chinn, English
Department, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave., New york, NY 10021.

Process for Considering Manuscripts

When we get an unsolicited article, unless it is clearly outside our boundaries, the manuscript coordinator sends it to four readers from the editorial group. The coordinator also evaluates the article. So most manuscripts get five readings.

Usually a couple of the readers will be fairly expert in the subject of the article, and the others will be in different areas or from different levels of educational work. The attempt is to critique articles both for sound and current knowledge and for general interest and readability.

When all the readings are in, the coordinator weighs the readers' opinions and makes a decision based on them. That decision may be a plain "accept" or "reject." Or it may be one of the three other possibilities. (1) We tell some authors that if they make specific revisions, we will accept the revised article. (2) With others, we encourage revision and give suggestions (often detailed) for making revisions. We indicate that we hope to work with the author toward publication, but cannot guarantee it. (3) We tell other authors that we would be glad to read a drastic revision, or a different kind of article about the same subject. In every case except that of immediate acceptance or that of a totally unacceptable article, we try to give helpful criticism. And, though we don't always manage it, we try to get the article and critique back to the author in two or three months.

When authors do submit revisions, the original readers may read the new version or we may bring in new readers from the editorial group.

Articles written for a "cluster" focused on a particular topic go directly to the "cluster" editors. Generally these articles have been solicited in response to proposals from the authors whose proposals have been encouraged. The "cluster" editors work with the authors toward publication. Prospectuses for non-cluster articles get the same treatment as unsolicited manuscripts.

Teaching Notes

Is there a book, film, essay, poem, or story you've found particularly useful in the classroom and want to share with other Radical Teacher readers? We are especially interested in Teaching Notes on new materials not widely known, but we would also like to hear about newly rediscovered older works as well as new ways of teaching familiar ones. Contributions should be about 500 words and should include the following kinds of information: school, course, kinds of students, how you taught the work, difficulties as well as triumphs. Also, please supply the title, author, publisher, and current price (or comparable data for a film).

In an effort to expand this column, we would also like to invite submissions of another sort, namely brief descriptions of classroom experiences that challenged, encouraged, or frustrated you. Has something unexpected happened in class, something-whether you handled it well, handled it badly, or are still trying to decide-that you believe our readers can learn from? Again, please try to keep your Teaching Note to under 500 words. Please send a hard copy to Bob Rosen, Department of English, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, New Jersey 07470 - and also an e-mail, with the header "Teaching Note," to: bobrosen@radicalteacher.org.

News for Educational Workers

Is there a news item, call for papers, upcoming conference, resource, teaching tool or other information related to progressive education that you would like to share with other Radical Teacher readers? Conference announcements and calls for papers should be at least six months ahead of date. Items, which will be used as found appropriate by Radical Teacher, cannot be returned. Send hard copy to Leonard Vogt, Department of English, LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), 31-10 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City, New York 11101—or email items to: lvogt@radicalteacher.org.

Elementary and Secondary School Teachers—Write Articles, Please!

Radical Teacher encourages our readers to submit articles to the magazine. We are especially interested in working with elementary and secondary school teachers, on all levels from preschool to high school. Within the past few years the magazine has included an increasing number of articles by elementary and secondary school teachers, but the majority of articles are still written by and for "higher education" teachers. It is obvious, but bears repeating, that radical education, or at least a radical critique or vision of education, must include the world of children, and their teachers. Therefore we are committed to working with elementary and secondary school teachers, and giving voice to their concerns and knowledge through the magazine. Descriptions of classroom life; the role of the teacher in the school and school system; curricular decisions, initiatives and choices; reactions to minimum competency, national reports on the status of teachers and teacher education, standardized testing, master teacher/merit pay are examples of topics we would very much welcome.

For further information, contact Joseph Entin at josentin@aol.com

« Back

Instructions to Authors of Accepted Articles
Revised August 2001

Since all editorial work involved in getting out an issue of Radical Teacher is done on a volunteer basis by people who work full-time at other jobs, please comply with the following guidelines when you submit the final copy of your manuscript:

  1. Text Preparation
    1. All copy, including endnotes, etc., should be double-spaced with 1" margins. Further, if possible, use Times Roman 12 pt font, or the equivalent, for all copy.
    2. Left justify all text except for sub heads which may be center justified.
    3. USE ENDNOTES NOT FOOTNOTES IN YOUR MANUSCRIPT.
    4. Use italic font, not underlining for text in italics.
    5. Titles and subheads should be typed with capital and lower-case letters.
    6. In addition to the file containing the text of your article, submit a separate file containing a brief Contributors’ Note.
  2. You should submit a disk with your hard copy that indicates the wordprocessing program used and whether your disc is in PC or MAC format. THE FINAL HARD COPY YOU SUBMIT SHOULD AGREE IN EVERY DETAIL WITH THE COPY ON YOUR DISK.
  3. References may be in any standard form providing they are consistent within your manuscript. Make sure each reference is complete, i.e., it contains, in addition to author and title, year and place of publication, publisher's name, and page references.
  4. If you wish, you may submit a list of suggested pull quotes from your text, including page reference for each suggested quote. About one quote per three pages of text would be plenty. Please note that at the discretion of the editor, all or none of your suggestions may actually be used.
  5. We greatly appreciate receiving suggested illustrations from authors. If the illustrations are copyrighted, we require a release together with the illustration.
  6. From time to time Radical Teacher receives requests from publishers and teachers for the right to reprint an article. Our policy is to give such permissions gratis for one- time use in teacher-generated anthologies for use in particular classes. In response to requests from publishers, we currently charge either $100 per article by university and small presses or $200 for larger commercial presses. In order to make sure that we can send one-half of the fee we charge to the author(s) of reprinted articles, please keep your current address on file with us at P.O. Box 382616, Cambridge MA 02238. Please make sure to write "Author's Address" on the envelope of the letter or the post card you send us with your current address.

Manuscript Sample: Article

Teaching about Sweatshops and the Global Economy
By John Miller

“How often do you see students protesting the exploitation of labor,” a friend and fellow political economist, asked me late one evening. “They deserve our support,” he insisted. Of course they do. That is why last Fall I taught “Sweatshops and the Global Economy,” a first year seminar at Wheaton College, a small New England liberal arts college, where I have worked for over two decades. ....

.....Those struggles are much of what I report on in my article. I developed techniques (exercises, arguments, and discussion strategies), and found materials (videos, pamphlets, personal testimonies) that worked—engaged the students in a critical analysis of sweatshops, of the effects of globalization, and of the role of women in the world export factories. But many times my efforts fell short. I try to report honestly what I learned from those efforts as well. Inside Sweatshops and The Global Economy...

Manuscript Sample: Review

No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers
Ed. by Andrew Ross. Verso, 1997.

By Sanya Hyland

No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers, offers a generous portion of essays edited by Andrew Ross. Published in 1997, the book recaps the “Year of the Sweatshop,” in which several huge corporations suffered a series of high-profile, media-savvy exposes,...

Manuscript Sample: Contributors' Notes

Paul Atwood is a member of the American Studies faculty at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a co-founder of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, where his now a research associate. He specializes in US foreign policy and the interrelations between US culture and foreign policy.

Andres Carbacho-Burgos is an assistant professor of economics at Southwest Texas State University and a staff economist at the Center for Popular Economics, based at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in economics. He is currently doing research on the effect of neoliberal globalization policies on the largest Latin American economies, Argentina and Brazil in particular, and on the theory of development economics and growth as applied to Latin America.

Dennis Fox is on leave from his position as Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Psychology at the University of Illinois at Springfield and now lives in Massachusetts. He is co-editor of Critical Psychology: An Introduction (Sage, 1997) and co-founder of RadPsyNet:The Radical Psychology Network (http://www.uis.edu/~radpsy/). With Ron Sakolsky, he wrote “From ’Radical University’ to Agent of the State” in Radical Teacher #53 (recently updated for Teachers for a Democratic Culture). He can be reached at fox@uis.edu or through his website, which contains material on MCAS, his university’s politics, the juncture of critical psychology and law, and other topics (http://people.uis.edu/dfox1/).