the Assembly

Our mission 

The Assembly is an open-access, peer-reviewed, online publication housed in the School of Education at the «Ƶ. We advance public scholarship committed to democracy, diversity, equity, and justice in education. We cultivate and promote timely dialogue among educators, researchers, students, community members, and policymakers.

Aims and Scope: 

We showcase public scholarship authored by researchers, policy makers, educators, students, community members, and the public that addresses timely topics in education.  We are particularly interested in publishing work aimed at both transforming systems and local practices in the service of educational equity and social justice. Because we are a Colorado-based journal, in addition to publishing work by national contributors, we highlight work that engages with critical issues in our state and the Rocky Mountain region.  Each issue will be organized as follows: 

  • A peer-reviewed research section:

    • Scholarship on education issues of national importance

    • Scholarship on education issues in or related to Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region

  • A themed “dialogue” section:
    • Critical reflective essays authored by a range of stakeholders bringing together a wide-array of voices on a single issue

As an online journal, we encourage work presented in new and innovative formats that take advantage of multimedia possibilities and create opportunities for ongoing conversations.

What is Public Scholarship?

Public scholarship is:

  • Timely: it is responsive to and engages with current debates and realities.
  • Relevant: it is relevant to educators, policymakers and community members seeking to make informed decisions about their work.
  • Critical: it illuminates and interrogates the power dynamics that shape policy and practice.
  • Place-based: it informs the socio-political context from which it emerges and for which it is used.
  • Accessible: it can be understood by and is useful for those who most directly feel the impact of the scholarship.  
  • Expansive: it broadens the boundaries of what counts as scholarship and redefining expertise in education research. 

Our work is guided by three organizing principles:

  1. Education research must open up space for all groups to speak, in their own voices, about their own experiences so that their knowledges become part of the collective social understanding.
  2. Education research must be accessible, and comprehensible to those who are most directly impacted by the research so that collective understandings can include discourse that names injustices, validating the social and educational experiences of marginalized groups.
  3. Education research must engage in full reciprocal dialogue with those who are most directly impacted by research.

Our Commitments: 

We aim to cultivate discourse across communities that are not often in conversation with one another. In order to foster respectful and reasonable discourse, we reject “both sides” logic when any side includes dehumanizing language and false equivalences. We are committed to public discourse that acknowledges unequal power dynamics and prioritizes respect and dignity, particularly for people who have been historically marginalized and silenced. Our commitment to public discourse does not bar disagreement or dissent, but it does bar discourse that fails to recognize the humanity and dignity of all people.