Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • I/We are the author(s) of the work and approve the work for publication. If the work contains multiple authors, all authors have agreed that this work be submitted.
  • I/We take responsibility for the contents and warrant that the work does not contain libelous or unlawful statements or infringe on the rights or privacy of others or contain material or instructions that might cause harm or injury.
  • The work has not been previously published or submitted elsewhere for consideration.
  • The work has been anonymized to facilitate anonymous peer review, unless an invited piece.
  • The work uses APA 7th edition when citing references and includes DOIs and URLs where available.
  • I/We have obtained permission for any copyrighted material used, including images or other media, and will provide documentation to the journal.
  • All authors accept the Creative Commons license terms as outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • For any research involving human participants, I/We have provided confirmation of ethics board clearance within the body of the text.
  • I/We have declared any conflicts of interest.
  • I/we have not used generative AI, including Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) or other AI-assisted technologies, to generate substantive pieces of the submitted work. Any use of AI-related technologies is clearly explained and documented in the manuscript (for example, in the Methods section) and cited as per the most recent standards of APA Style.

Author Guidelines

Imagining SoTL: Guidelines for authors

Thank you for considering Imagining SoTL (IS). We encourage presenters at the Banff Symposium to submit full papers (up to 6,000 words including references) based upon their presentations at the Symposium for peer review. We also invite participants to submit based on their experience at the Symposium in the other submission categories.

Submissions may be articles (including empirical, scholarly, or theoretical pieces situated in relation to SoTL literature), reflective essays in response to a keynote presentation, or creative responses to Pop-Up Poetry. Articles (max 6000 words) and essays (max 4000 words) should  explore an aspect of teaching and learning, be grounded in context and the literature, be methodologically and/or conceptually sound, and provide a new contribution to the SoTL conversation. Creative responses to Pop-Up will express the author’s unique voice, will be no more than 1500 words, and may include an image of the poem received. We are interested in receiving forms of alternative scholarship such as podcasts or arts-based research. 

IS aims for high quality and values methodological richness and variety from a diversity of perspectives and contributors. Articles and essays are anonymously peer-reviewed, while invited pieces and creative responses are reviewed by the editorial board. Submissions should be previously unpublished and not under review by any other journal.

Intended audience

This open access publication serves a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Authors should keep this audience in mind while preparing their submissions. 

Format and Style Guidelines

We encourage submissions written in English using the active voice; for example, it is fine to use the first person when describing your study (“We interviewed ten participants” rather than “Interviews of ten participants were conducted”). Please try to avoid most abbreviations and disciplinary specific jargon. If you want to use an abbreviation, please write the phrase in full the first time, followed by the abbreviation in brackets. When referring to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, refer to it in full the first time, and then use the abbreviation SoTL (not SOTL). 

Please use the American Psychological Association (APA) 7th edition when citing references. Include DOIs and URLs where available. Your submission should be double spaced, contain page numbers, and be in Times New Roman 12pt font. Please use italics rather than underlining. Note: Given that we are also open to alternatives to traditional research articles, you may submit using an alternative format if it is called for by your topic, and is consistently implemented. You should explain your rationale in the cover letter. Decisions about alternate formats will be made on a case by case basis by the editorial team. 

If your submission contains charts, tables, or figures, please insert them into the document where they would appear in the published version. For guidance on how to create and label charts, tables, and figures, please refer to APA 7th edition.

More detailed instructions for authors, with examples, can be downloaded here: 

https://mrujs.mtroyal.ca/index.php/is/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/6

Technical Guidelines for Submission

All submissions should be anonymized to facilitate anonymous peer review, with the exception of invited papers. Please remove author names and references to specific institutions or programs for the peer review process. To ensure your manuscript is fully anonymized, please follow the instructions for "Ensuring a Blind Review" found on the OJS submission screen.

Please submit in WORD (.doc or .docx) or RTF format. We cannot accept PDF files.

Ethics

For any research involving human participants, you must provide confirmation of ethics board clearance within the body of the text. 

You must also declare any Conflicts of Interest.

You must be the author(s) of the submission; you must have approved the work for publication; you must take responsibility for the content of the submission; and you warrant that the submission does not contain libelous or unlawful statements or infringe on the rights or privacy of others or contain material or instructions that might cause harm or injury.

Authors are responsible for notifying editors and providing retractions or corrections of mistakes promptly.

ORCID

ORCID is a free digital identifier that uniquely distinguishes scholars. Imagining SoTL recommends that all reviewers and authors register for an ORCID identifier at https://orcid.org/. ORCID information supplied for each author will be included in the article’s author list.

Responses to Keynotes

Responses are welcomed as follows. To submit, you should have attended the relevant keynote.

  • 1500 word essay exploring one aspect of the talk (please specify), or 
  • 3000-5000 word paper, on several elements or connecting to another body of work  (example, your own scholarship) 

 

Creative Responses

These will be short pieces of 1000 words or less on one, two, or  all three of the questions below. But please don’t feel confined by them; if there’s an approach to the discussion we haven’t covered in our questions, feel free to write from  it instead. If you'd like to write a longer essay, you can propose that, but we are thinking  of this as a series of short explorations. You have the option to upload an image of your  poem as well, but this is not required. 

  1. What, if any, implication does your experience with Pop-Up poetry have for your engagement with students?
  2. Did having a Pop-Up poem of your own, or sharing it, or hearing one of someone else’s have any effect on your feelings about the Symposium as a whole or how you participated in it? 
  3. Outside of the classroom and the conference centre, did your experience of having a poem created around a word you offered and the conversation that followed with your poet, have any effect on how you’ve approached or thought  about any other aspect of your life or work? 

These submissions will be reviewed by the editorial board. 

Articles

Submissions may be research articles, reflective essays, calls for collaboration, reports on SoTL  in practice, or other scholarly works written for a broad SoTL audience, developed from conference sessions at the yearly Symposium for SoTL. Manuscripts (2500-6000 words) should explore an aspect of teaching and learning, be grounded in context and the literature, be  methodologically/conceptually sound, and contribute to the SoTL conversation. 

IS aims for high quality and values methodological richness and variety from a diversity of  perspectives and contributors. Article submissions are double-blind peer-reviewed.  

Copyright Notice

Imagining SoTL is an open access publication.  There are no article processing charges for publishing in Imagining SoTL. We believe that open access is a public good as it promotes sharing of knowledge. Such access is associated with increased readership and increased citation of an author's work.

Copyright for articles is retained by the authors. As of Volume 4(2), copyright is under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.  Please note that if you are uploading supplemental files, like datasets or survey instruments, these must also be provided under an open license and archived in an open repository. For more information, contact the editors.

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for any copyrighted material used, including illustrations, and providing documentation to the journal. 

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