Welcome to CAIRN Journal. The value and vitality of CAIRN will be sustained by its commitment and ability to reach out and offer new insights and understanding for teaching practitioners, managers, administrators, educational developers and leaders within the Scottish college sector.
Publishing articles that offer independent, critical evaluations and engaging reflections on the ways in which the sector operates and interfaces with local, regional and national developments, and policy imperatives will be a fundamental part of the journal’s overall remit.
In addition to engaging with, informing and where appropriate, challenging, contemporary thinking and practice within the sector, the hope is that CAIRN will evolve to play a critical role in the fostering and supporting of a vibrant Scottish college researcher network and community.
The timing for this new journal is highly appropriate. The post-regionalisation years (since 2012) have ushered in unparalleled cultural and structural change to the Scottish college sector. Under regionalisation, the sector has been increasingly implicated in national and regional socio-economic development and, consequently, it has shifted considerably from its traditional anchor points, becoming increasingly more organic, growing in scope and reach in new directions. Within the regionalisation frame, colleges have been responding and re-aligning (in both similar and idiosyncratic ways) to the emerging socio-economic policies, regional challenges and markets. Through this process they have become increasingly more innovative, complex and multi-layered institutions.
In contemporary times our Scottish colleges can be characterised as highly animated in their outreach and outlook; becoming more responsive and receptive to the fast-moving currents of technological innovation and emergent teaching and learning paradigms and trends. They have evolved to become vibrant places and spaces in which learners, cast in the role of discursive consumers with manifold mutable needs and expectations, are socially and academically networked, supported and enriched in a myriad of ways.
Ultimately, the sector is more networked and engaged with its stakeholders and, as such, subject to new and evolving levels of accountability. Indeed, the college sector is a highly dynamic and rich field for exploration and research. However, what has been absent is a suitable platform where these progressive and evolving macro and micro level developments experienced by different constituents can be discursively mapped, unpacked, interrogated, critically evaluated, celebrated and disseminated.
We hope that CAIRN will create such a platform.
The CDN CAIRN Journal Editorial Board are:
Kevin Brosnan (University of Stirling)
Christine Calder (Dundee & Angus College)
Neale Gardiner (Edinburgh College)
Gordon Hunt (CDN)
Patrick O’Donnell (UHI Perth)
For all enquiries please email: research@cdn.ac.uk