Building the capacity, quality and readership-base of the Journal of Character Education (JCE)

The Center for Character and Citizenship at the University of Missouri-St. Louis is asking for 3 years of support from the JTF for the enhancement of the support system and practices of the Journal of Character Education, the only scholarly journal dedicated to character education, in order to capitalize on a tipping point that would allow the JCE to both become more professional in its look and functioning and to make it self-sustaining through increased subscriptions. The core of the project is to fund for three years a doctoral level graduate assistant who will function as the Managing Editor of the JCE. For 5 months, the JCE has had an Interim Managing Editor, a doctoral student donated by Prof Richard Lerner at Tufts University, to help transition to the hoped for JTF funding of this project. This experience has already demonstrated the powerful impact of such a position for a journal that has no funding yet has survived for over a decade largely by the pro bono support of the PI (who is also a founding editor of the JCE). The field of character education needs a means for the dissemination of scientific and philosophical knowledge in order to publicize the often contrarian research findings on what works in character education; contrarian in that practice is often based on intuition and many science-based approaches are counter-intuitive. The project will enhance the JCE in the following ways: improve and professionalize the systems of the JCE; increase marketing of subscriptions to the JCE (included in the project are 150 subscription scholarships to graduate students in related fields of study); increase manuscript submissions to the JCE, including guest-edited thematic issues including issues focusing on topics of interest to JTF (e.g., virtue-specific issues). The results will be a self-sustaining second decade of the JCE (and beyond) based on profitability and profit-sharing with the publisher.