International Journal on Christianity and Education (IJCE)

Call for Articles: Special issue on Disability 

The Journal

The International Journal of Christian Education publishes scholarship that explores the relationship between Christianity and all aspects of education at all levels and in all types of school, university or college as well as church and community settings worldwide. Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not restricted to, education policy, leadership, teaching and learning, curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher development. 
Contributions must be scholarly articles grounded in relevant academic literatures and are subject to peer review. They may represent forms of inquiry drawn from a range of disciplines; work accepted by the journal includes but is not necessarily limited to philosophical, theological, historical, and empirical inquiry. Contributions may be in the form of theoretical articles, reports of research, analyses of developments in curriculum and practice, literature reviews, and book reviews. Contributions are welcomed from researchers, scholars, graduate students and reflective practitioners.
The Journal is owned by Calvin College and operated by the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning and Graduate Studies in Education at Calvin College. Calvin College operates from a confessional basis, affirming the Christian scriptures as the central authority for faith and conduct. The pages of the Journal, however, are open to academically sound articles by authors of any persuasion, provided that they provoke constructive thought on issues consistent with the Journal's purpose. The editorial panel reserves the right to maintain a weighting towards constructive Christian engagement in the balance of articles, and to commission rejoinders where these are considered useful in the dialogue.
IJCE is published by SAGE.

The context of this special issue

Disability and the experience of impairment is a significant theme in the Bible. Jesus’ healing of people with disabilities is seen as a miraculous act, many figures in the Bible had disabilities, and sometimes impairment is used as a punishment for immoral acts. In addition, disabilities such as blindness, deafness, mental illness and impaired limbs are seen as an important moral and practical issue by many Christians today and a number of churches see the curing of people who are ill or experience disability as part of their  worship life. Therefore, it could be argued that the study of disability is a fundamental component of Christian ethics.
 
Furthermore, given Christianity’s status as a world religion, Christians are born with disabilities, raised and experience disabilities later in life in a number of different cultural and educational settings. In accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Disabled Person, people with disabilities have as much right to educational and cultural inclusion as their able-bodied peers. This can present a number of challenges to the pedagogy of teachers of students with identified disabilities, and the support and educational experiences of Christian students and teachers with disabilities.
 
In scholarly literature, the perception of disability in Christianity is also a significant topic of discussion, and a number of authors have raised theological questions about the received wisdom on disability. For example, a number of traditional disability theorists, such as Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer, have claimed that the Bible discriminates against disability and people with disabilities, and argued that Christianity represents impairment, difference and diversity negatively. Authors such as the theologian and religious educator John Hull, who is blind, have also argued that from the point of view of a person who is visually impaired the Bible can seem prejudicial towards people who are blind and treat blindness negatively. Yet images of disability such as the broken body of Jesus on the cross have also helped people to understand the imperfections of humanity from a positive Christian standpoint. Historically, Simon Hayhoe observes that Christians founded the modern separate education of children who are blind and deaf, and provided moral management of adults with mental illness, in a belief that teaching could provide a spiritual treatment for their impairments. Furthermore, he observes that experimentations with blindness and mental illness were used to empirically test passages in the Bible in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were subsequently crucial to the philosophies of the enlightenment.
 
Invited articles
Authors are invited to submit articles for consideration for publication in a themed issue of the IJCE on disability, which is scheduled for publication in November 2015. Articles are welcome from, but  not restricted to, teachers, graduate students, researchers, theologians, ministers, pedagogues and those who work with people who have disabilities. Invited themes include, but are again not by any means restricted to, the following:

Pedagogies of teaching Christianity to students with disabilities•	
The teaching of disability through Christianity•	
Teaching Christianity in relation to disability in different cultural, ethnic or national settings•	
Case studies of students with disabilities in Christian education•	
Scholarly, reflective autobiographies of Christian teachers and students with disabilities•	
Christian ethics in relation to disability in the teaching of subjects such as citizenship or history•	
Experiences and/or models of exclusion or inclusion in Christian education•	
Theologies or Christian-themed philosophies of disability•	
Christianity in the education of people who are newly experiencing disabilities•	
Christianity, disability and adult and continuing education•	
Assistive technologies and Christian education
 
The deadline for submissions is 15th March 2015

To submit your work, please email a copy of the manuscript to the guest editor, Simon Hayhoe, at simon.hayhoe@canterbury.ac.uk. 

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts of 4,000 to 5,000 words should be submitted as a file in a standard word-processing format to the appropriate editorial e-mail address. Everything, including endnotes, should be double spaced. To facilitate anonymous review by referees, the author’s name should not appear in the article; please include a separate cover sheet that contains the article title, an abstract of up to 100 words, the author’s name and full contact details, a single-sentence institutional affiliation, up to six keywords and phrases that describe the article’s focus, and a statement that the article is original and has not been published elsewhere. Contributors should retain copies of their files since the editors can take no responsibility in case of loss or damage. Acceptance of manuscripts is subject to the journal’s peer review policy. Authors should bear in mind that they are addressing an international readership and either avoid or explain local jargon.

Citations must conform to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed., 2nd printing or later). A full bibliography, including only those works cited, should appear at the end of the article. Endnotes should be numbered consecutively in the text. If specialized software is used to prepare the citations and bibliography, please convert all fields to editable text before submitting.

Peer Review Policy

In order to ensure the quality of articles published, the IJCE requires that all submitted manuscripts be subjected to double-blind, peer review. Published articles do not necessarily reflect the personal beliefs of the editors or reviewers.

Initial Manuscript Review

All submitted manuscripts are first evaluated by the editors. A manuscript may be rejected at this stage for any of the following reasons:

•	it does not make a significant contribution to the field of Christian thinking about education;
•	it will not be of interest to the journal’s intended readership;
•	it contains too many grammatical or stylistic infelicities; or
•	it contains irremediable problems in methodology or interpretation.
Authors of manuscripts rejected after an initial review will be informed via e-mail within 3 weeks of receipt.

The Review Process

After passing the initial review, manuscripts are sent to two peer reviewers who are considered knowledgeable in the general topic of the manuscript. Personal information is stripped from the original manuscript (explicit first-person references within the body of the text that may betray the identity of the author are blanked when possible, but passages will not be rewritten in order to ensure anonymity). Review is double blind: only the editors know the identities of the author and reviewers.

Reviewers are given 8–10 weeks to choose one of the following options:

•	publication;
•	publication with response (a deadline must be indicated);
•	publication with revisions;
•	resubmission with more substantial rewriting;
•	submission to another journal (to be indicated); or
•	rejection.

A third reviewer will be sought if an initial reviewer is able to identify the author or if the reviewers’ recommendations are in significant conflict. In either case, a third reviewer will be selected for an additional, brief, double-blind review.

The editors will then collect comments from all reviewers and inform the author of the consensus. All comments, including those of the editor, will be passed on to the author in summary form. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the editor and author will decide on a deadline by which a final version must be submitted.

If you would like to discuss your ideas for articles or you have further questions, issues or articles for this special issue, please contact Simon Hayhoe on the email address given above.