LIORA BRESLER
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (USA)
July 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (4): 128–31 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.4.128
The invitation to engage publicly as a peer reviewer with the ideas identified by Patrick Schmidt’s fine paper, “Learning Challenges in the Closed System of Peer-Review and Editorship,” exemplifies alternatives to the current, isolated practice of peer reviews. Peer review, Patrick notes, is an unmentored, solitary process, one that is rarely rebutted or recognized.[1] I will respond to the themes addressed in Patrick’s paper, echoing and elaborating from my situated perspective as a reviewer and editor working with reviewers. The metaphors for journals extended below imply, I suggest, an ethics of three-fold care in the process of peer review: care for the field, care for authors whose papers we review, and care for ourselves.
Patrick’s portrayal of the peer review scene encompasses the exceptional editors who have inspired him, as well as more common practices. His observation on the lack of regular spaces to discuss and share challenges in peer reviews highlighted for me the contrast with the public nature of “rites of passage” of doctoral students. It also contrasts with the structures of review panels created by some funding agencies, particularly in the sciences (e.g., NSF, NIH in the US) in reviewing grant applications, requiring reviewers to engage with others in discussing the merits and weaknesses of submitted proposals.
Given the lack of mentoring afforded to peer reviewing in journals, the question of what skills and sensibilities shape reviewing is an intriguing one. Criteria for peer reviewers, Patrick notes, include knowledge of the field, dexterity, and, importantly, intellectual humility that enables scholars to engage with diverse perspectives, a quality that Patrick beautifully exemplifies in his paper. I would like to add to these criteria a mindset that can simultaneously hold a two-fold relationships and commitments to: (1) expanding knowledge in the field, and (2) providing a meaningful educational opportunity to the author(s). While both commitments are relational, the first centers on a broad, distant community of scholars; the second relates to specific, even if invisible and typically unknown individual(s). If the first commitment is based on general principles, the second involves a more nuanced, situated-specific interaction. I suggest that philosopher Aharon Ben-Ze’ev’s distinction between “associates/intimates” versus “strangers” (Ben-Ze’ev 1997) helps clarify the differences between these two relationships and why it takes a special personal awareness to juxtapose them skillfully.
Endeavors that juxtapose relationships to associates and strangers operate in other key academic experiences. Early in my research career, I noted a parallel layer of relationships in qualitative research with regard to research participants (Bresler 1996). Qualitative research, conducted in private and semi-private settings, and encompassing personal beliefs and values, renders public that which is typically private, and in this process, juxtaposes these two realms in a newly distinct way (Bresler 1996, 19). When it comes to publicly communicating the research to the larger community of scholars, the writing sometimes presents a two-dimensional portrayal of participants, neglecting their humanity and the complexity of their situation as captured in the process of research.
In the context of blind peer-review, what is essentially a one-to-one (with the added presence of the editor) communication between reviewer and author can be rendered as a distant transaction, motivated by, to use Patrick’s words, a sense of power and self-centeredness. Let me emphasize that when I talk about care in reviewing, I do not mean sugar-coating or avoiding critical feedback. Rather, it is about cultivating a tone that is respectful of a researcher who likely invested a great deal of time and resources and carries a strong sense of ownership with their work.
Care as an aspect of being in a public disciplinary field is a relatively new concept, markedly different from the traditional private associations of care. Traditionally, care has been regarded as less desirable in the public sphere (e.g., Linn and Gilligan 1990). This view has shifted in the past three decades, with political scientist Joan Tronto as a pioneering and leading voice in her claim for the need of care in the public sphere (Tronto 1993, 2013; see also Hamington 2014). The recent volume edited by Karin Hendricks (2023) centering on care in music education is an important landmark in our discipline. A continued conversation on care within a scholarly field is, I believe, essential to our profession.
Care for others’ scholarly work reflects back to our own work and sense of belonging in the scholarly community. Parker Palmer’s (1998) observation that we teach who we are, leading to my own observation that we research who we are, and acknowledging the reciprocal nature of this relationships (Bresler 2008),[2] applies, I believe, to reviewing and editing. We bring the values, commitments and aspirations that guide us in our professional/personal lives to the process of peer reviews, and in turn, are likely to be shaped by these processes.
As an editor and a reviewer, I have encountered the range of motivations for peer reviewing listed by Patrick, from service to self-centeredness, sometimes co-existing in the same review(er). Clearly, evaluation and education can be fully integrated, or not. Reviewers can be seen as collaborators, helping writers develop and articulate their ideas with depth, clarity, and impact. Reviews can support and expand. They can also make an author feel small and unworthy. While summative evaluation is an essential aspect of a review, the greater energy spent in reviews is concerned with formative evaluation. Whether the recommendation is to publish, revise, resubmit or reject, evaluation can be done with wisdom and care. For a reviewer, the task of reviewing submitted papers provides an opportunity for tuned listening. Care also means communicating the review in ways that acknowledge the presence of a listener on the other end. The role of journal editors in sending submissions to reviewers who understand the authors’ field and mission is crucial. Editors are also in a position to provide an overall constructive communication to authors in ways that will acknowledge the dignity of the author.
Peer reviewing and editing have been important and fulfilling aspects of my academic life and continue to be so in my current stage of retirement. My own attraction and commitment to editing were launched by Eunice Boardman’s invitation, more than three decades ago, to edit a special issue for the Bulletin of Council of Research in Music Education (Bresler 1994), based on the first qualitative research conference in Illinois which we co-organized. The papers in this special issue included keynoters who were outsiders to music education, scholars Norman Denzin, Fred Erickson, Alan Peshkin, and Robert Stake, as well as researchers in music education: Keith Swanwick, Magne Espeland, Clem Adelman, and Rudy Radocy. While the conference was a key event in establishing qualitative voices in the USA as legitimate in the then-positivist scene of music education, Eunice Boardman and I understood that it would be through journal papers that qualitative methodology gained acceptance in the discipline. A publication has a different kind of credibility and impact from an evanescent conference, however significant.
Since then, I have served on the board of many journals, mostly in music and arts education, and guest edited seventeen special issues in various journals in these disciplines. Reviewing and editing, I realized time and again, connect me to fellow researchers in a far-reaching community united by our shared commitment to and care of the field. It is an opportunity to serve the profession, to applaud great scholarship, to educate and support other writers. While I initially regarded journals as “oxygen for the profession,” I now realize that editing and reviewing also function as my oxygen. I learned from the many reviewers who extended themselves to support and expand my scholarly work and was expanded by the perspective of reviewing and editing, with the benefit of distance from the work as I aim to learn from it and add, when useful, from my own perspective.
Reflecting on my role as journal editor with its ongoing interaction with peer reviewers (Bresler 2023) generated two additional metaphors. The metaphor of a multi-level plaza captures the function of a journal as a meeting place for the curated display, exchange and elaboration of ideas. Reminiscent of the art museum where I worked earlier in my career, journals have two levels. The publicly visible level of published papers is a gathering space for scholarly communities with shared interests. The underground level, like the basement and back offices of a museum where restoration and incubating processes for upcoming exhibits happen, accommodates, as Patrick suggests, the exchange among editors, reviewers, and authors.
A third metaphor of journal papers is an animated, interconnected organism where authors, peer reviewers and audiences are all in dynamic relationship. If the oxygen metaphor highlights the breath, and the plaza metaphor highlights the communal aspect, the organism metaphor highlights the pulsing heart and interdependence of the various constituents of the journal. Like Russian dolls, these metaphors are not distinct but nested: the requisite interdependence for biological life expands to a vibrant, open community and then to an intensified interconnectedness of all participants (Bresler 2023).
While these metaphors capture some general aspects of editing and peer review, they do not depict the specific dynamics—both consonant and dissonant aspects—of peer reviews and their communication. In my positions of editorship, I was lucky to have a broad group of interdisciplinary reviewers who were insightful and generous, even with the understanding that their work would get little acknowledgement except by me as an editor, and that they would remain anonymous to the authors and the scholarly community.
I know that such generosity is not a given, and this touches on another important topic identified by Patrick: the increasing commercialization of research journals by “for profit” publishers relying on the work of researchers and reviewers whose work goes unreimbursed. Among the independent journals that Patrick lists in his table is the International Journal of Education and the Arts, established by Tom Barone and me in 1999 with Gene Glass, who had a vision of free access journals and the capacity to execute it.
Crucial to peer debriefing and editing, I believe, is the awareness of why we do what we do, motivations and aspirations, as well as the consideration of what will be useful to both the scholarly community and individual authors. I applaud the initiative of the editors and Patrick Schmidt’s paper for addressing these issues with insight and care, inviting us all to engage and contribute additional layers.
References
Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. 1997. Emotions and morality. The Journal of Value Inquiry 31 (2): 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004236823330
Bresler, Liora. 1994. Guest editorial. Council of Research in Music Education 122: 9–13.
Bresler, Liora. 1996. Towards the creation of a new code of ethics in qualitative research. Council of Research in Music Education 130: 17–29.
Bresler, Liora. 2008. Research as experience and the experience of research: Mutual shaping in the arts and in qualitative inquiry. Learning Landscapes 2 (1): 267–79.
Bresler, Liora. 2023. Journals as spaces for tuned listening: Metaphors, origins, and evolving vitality. International Journal of Education & the Arts 24. http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea24ia1
Hamington, Maurice. 2014. Care as personal, political, and performative. In Moral boundaries redrawn: The significance of Joan Tronto’s argument for professional ethics. http://works.bepress.com/maurice_hamington/24/
Hendricks, Karin, ed. 2023. The Oxford handbook of care in music education. Oxford University Press.
Linn, Ruth, and Carol Gilligan. 1990. One action, two moral orientations—The tension between justice and care: Voices in Israeli selective conscientious objectors. New Ideas in Psychology 8 (2):189–203.
Palmer, Parker. 1998. The courage to teach. Jossey-Bass.
Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.
Tronto, Joan. 2013. Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.
[1] Clearly, peer reviewing is not the only academic activity that is not mentored. Teaching in higher education is another key academic activity that is not part of the formal curriculum. Still, unlike peer reviews, many institutions create structures and opportunities to address teaching in higher education, providing, in essence an “in-service” support.
[2] As we shape our research, our research shapes us.