President: Elizabeth Macedo, Brazil
Vice President: Lesley Le Grange, South Africa
Secretary: Poonam Batra, India
Treasurer: Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Canada
Executive Council’s Update to the General Membership (June 30, 2013)
We first and foremost wish to thank all the members, for the trust you have placed in us. We hope to be worthy of your trust throughout our time as the IAACS Executive Council. At the same time, we would like to acknowledge the remarkable contribution of the former Executive in guiding IAACS in generative directions. Our thanks — and we are sure we could speak on behalf of the Association affiliates — to Zhang Hua, Terry Carlson and Wayne Hugo for having contributed much time and intellectual energy to IAACS.
Starting work…
One of the major problems we are facing in our Association is that of sustaining effective and frequent communication. We have strong and deep conversations during the Conferences, but then we tend to lose touch with each other. As decided at the last Business Meeting in Rio, we would endeavor to improve our conversation in between meetings. As you know, the Association now has a website (http://www.iaacs.ca) where we can find our last updates. We will also try to keep you posted via regular emails. Therefore, it is important that all members take time to register themselves on the website. This note will be disseminated via email for which we will depend upon the lists collated during earlier Conferences. All future communication however will be done using email IDs of registered members only. It is important to have records of our affiliates for many purposes, among which the smooth conduct of executive elections is critical. Besides asking you to register yourself (if not yet), we would like to count on your help to bring other curriculum scholars to our Association.
With improved and more frequent communication, we are sure to expand the scope of our conversations in between meetings. Of course, we are aware that the Association provides many possibilities of interactions between scholars that are already in place. What we would like to enhance is the opportunity for affiliates to know each other’s work as well. Some years ago we tried to use wiki pages to interact with each other, but it did not work as we were hoping. However, now that we are more familiar with social networks we can try to build a space for exchanging our research interests and work. We are working on creating an interactive space for uploading research abstracts and will let you know about this very soon.
We would also like to remind you that all of us can count on our Journal — Transnational Curriculum Inquiry (http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/TCI) — as an interactive space already available. Noel Gough did a great job creating and serving as the first Editor of TCI. Thanks to his special efforts, TCI is archived at PANDORA; catalogued in the National Library of Australia’s Bibliographic Database; and indexed by EBSCOhost and by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). We have been working hard to increase its indexation and we hope to hear some good news soon. Alice Casimiro Lopes and Wenjun Zhang have assumed the editorship of the journal from May 2013 and will lead this effort. The success of indexation processes will however, depend on the quality of the Journal, for which we count on our members to submit academically sound papers. We urge you to view the current and former issues of the Journal and to participate in sustaining its quality. Please also take a few minutes to check whether your data at TCI is updated. As our affiliates are from different countries, we do not know everybody’s work as yet, so it is important that you update your research areas so that the review process can work more meaningfully.
This is all for now. We will try to keep you posted as much as possible.
Sincere thanks and all best wishes,
Beth, Lesley, Poonam and Nicholas