Making a Bigger Impact

A CGS online academic journal gets a new, wider-reaching platform

By Chelsea Feinstein

Since its launch in 2012, the online academic journal that CGS publishes twice a year has solidified the college’s reputation as a thought leader in interdisciplinary education.

Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning will relaunch on a new online platform that will expand its reach and will streamline the peer review and publication processes. The journal is migrating from WordPress to Scholastica, a service specializing in publication tools for academic journals. The new platform also archives and indexes all articles to make them easier for scholars to find.

In March, Impact will publish a retrospective of its strongest pieces from the last 13 years, including scholarly and creative nonfiction essays about the theory, practice, and assessment of interdisciplinary education. The journal is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning (CITL) at CGS.

“Having Scholastica take some of the burden of the publication process and the peer review process, in addition to making the discoverability of the articles immediately better, just made huge sense,” says Davida Pines, CGS associate dean and CITL director.

Pines says that making the first issue on the new platform a retrospective was a natural choice. “We wanted to really honor all of the work that has been done over the years and to understand where we have been to figure out where we want to go from here,” she says.

In going through the journal’s back issues, Pines had an opportunity to revisit key moments in CGS’ history, from the implementation of the Capstone Project to the launch of the summer semester in London.

Pines says that at times like this, when society is faced with complex problems like climate change, pandemics, and challenges to democratic institutions, Impact’s mission of showcasing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to education is more important than ever.

“I do think that over the last 5 to 10 years there’s been an increasing embrace of interdisciplinarity and a belief that the problems we are currently facing cannot be solved without thinking across disciplines,” Pines says.

CGS Dean Natalie McKnight, who led the founding of Impact, is looking forward to how the new platform will allow the journal to grow.

“We founded Impact to be a means of sharing our expertise in interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and research as well as a way to learn from the expertise of other academics doing interdisciplinary work,” McKnight says. “This is still the mission of the journal, and I am excited it will now be available on a new platform that will increase its visibility and readership.”