Welcome to Educational Neuroscience

Abstract

As we enter a new year, we are hopeful, anticipatory, and optimistic about the future—as all starts to new years should begin. For a special and seemingly fleeting moment at the start of the year, we forget the encumbrances of the past and push ourselves to explore new possibilities, potentials, and partner-ships. It is exactly in this spirit and this new space that we launch the new journal Educational Neuroscience. Our explicit intention is to keep this hope and optimism alive throughout the year in bringing this journal to life. To do so, it is important to know how we as editors have come to this place. If you have spent any time in the academy, it is evident that despite much rhetoric and insistence we all too often remain siloed within our own domains. This is not surprising as we are incentivized and encouraged to become ''masters of our own domain,'' and doing so takes effort, energy, and concentrated focus on our topic of study. That effort is tremendously worth-while and critical in the development of knowledge, and we think the time is right for a new conception of collaboration and interchange that will hopefully come to life in the bits and bytes of this new open-access journal. Typically, educational institutions have not viewed them-selves, either as organizations or as individuals, as part of a larger interdependent and interconnected system or network. This failure to recognize and embrace the idea that our decisions, actions, and inactions are mutually influential and consequential has perhaps inhibited our collective ability to better integrate pressing issues in education and cognitive neuroscience that have been present for a number of years. As educational systems and agencies often operate in mind-sets of independence and scarcity, these systems often fail to recognize and embrace the connectedness and abundance in their context, thus in effect creating another type of poverty, a poverty of possibilities. Our educational institutions are complex systems situated in networks of interactions and interdependence. The question to be asked as we move further into the next decade of this century and beyond is how to create, nurture, and sustain these knowl-edge networks in support of generating new innovations that will have a profound impact on both education and cognitive neuroscientific research. This will necessitate systems to rede-fine what is valued, perhaps requiring fundamental shifts from the lone individual to leveraging connected networks of experi-mentation, reflection, and refinement, moving from the idea that the generation of knowledge is the purview of the sole investigator (or discipline) to embracing collaborative research that reflects thoughtful interactions among research, practice, and policy. We want to challenge the notion that information and knowledge are the possessions of traditional forms of pub-lication, which all too often limit access by those who could most use the knowledge. Further we want to acknowledge the need for more open-sourced materials available to wider audi-ences beyond the halls of the academy in order to promote and encourage dialogue across multiple sectors. These shifts sug-gest that we need to redefine what is recognized and rewarded in educational systems and move to new dynamic conceptions that incentivize the formation and spread of collaborative net-works comprising the muscle of individual knowledge and the connective tissue of social relationships. It is in this manner that we intend to move forward with Educational Neuroscience and our efforts to bridge learning, cognition, and the brain. In answer to long-present challenges in all of the fields relevant to fostering educational neuroscience (education, psy-chology, child development, neuroscience, and medicine), we will need to move beyond vestiges of an industrial mechanistic past to become more design based, dynamic, and networked. This approach will blur and eventually erode the lines between researchers and ''subjects,'' proprietary and public, creators and consumers, experts and novices, and most importantly researcher and practitioner. We believe these shifts also sug-gest additional important considerations for addressing a pov-erty of possibilities of our own making. Although we have spent a good deal of energy in developing and enacting rigor-ous approaches to research, which are critical, we have not made as much progress integrating research with improving practice and outcomes. Moving forward will require both rigor and relevance in the praxis of research, practice, and policy, and we intend this journal to do just that—to better link the potential that lies within our multiple interconnected fields to fundamentally transform how we think about and create edu-cational neuroscience. We recognize the high bar we are setting for ourselves and our contributors, but it is the biggest dreams that allow for the greatest payoff. The good news is that some of what we describe above exists across the globe in islands and outlets of excellence. Many of the readers of this introductory editorial are at the forefront of this work and engaged in charting new directions and building on the best of our past. You hold the spirit of the new year throughout your work, and it is both the new and the experienced voices we call to this journal. Within the broad fields of cognitive neuroscience and edu-cation, there is mutual enthusiasm about the promise of apply-ing what we learn from basic research on the growing mind and Educational Neuroscience Volume 1: 1-2