This post first appeared on aud.life
There was a dust-up the other night on Academic Twitter, when Matt Gold challenged the editors of Hybrid Pedagogy of failing to adequately disclose that their journal was funded by the learning management system Instructure. In response, Hybrid Pedagogy published a couple of open letters, penned by two of its co-founders Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, that (I think) were meant to assuage any concerns.
(Disclosure: I have published articles in both Hybrid Pedagogy and Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, where Gold serves as reviews editor. More disclosure: I consider Stommel, Morris, and Gold to be colleagues and friends.)
I have a pretty lengthy disclosure page on my website, because I think it’s an ethical imperative to be as clear as possible to readers where one stands. I do not believe that there’s such a thing as objectivity; we are all deeply and impossibly subjective, and our writing necessarily reflects that situatedness. This isn’t simply a matter of finances – although my god, it’s absolutely essential that any financial relationships are disclosed. I’ve included information about my academic background, for example, because my experiences certainly shape the way in which I approach the field of education technology. Everything I write is implicated, and I hope that by disclosing as much as I can about myself that readers can have a better picture of me in/and my work.
Who we are, where we come from shapes what we say. Who we are, where we come from shapes what we leave unsaid.
I’m not a journalist by training, but I do think a lot about what it means to do this work in public as ethically as possible. I believe disclosures should appear on a dedicated page – again, for individual writers as well as for the publication itself – as well as on or even in individual articles. For what it’s worth, I’m a fan of how the tech site Re/Code handles this. Each writer has an ethics statement that appears next to their name on every article they publish. (See, for example, founder Kara Swisher’s disclosures.) This statement appears even when there isn't something in a story that needs to be disclosed. Re/Code stands apart from most technology and ed-tech publications that tend to obscure their relationships to investors or to the companies they cover. (Cough, Edsurge, cough.) When an organization values disclosure and when it requires its writers to pen one, I think that everyone becomes a little bit more aware of the way in which their views are informed by the relationships around them. Again, this isn't simply about money. It's about politics. It's about ideology. Disclosures about how the whole process works can reveal a lot about how the "sausage gets made" in pitching, writing, editing, and publishing. That's incredibly important, particularly for those of us who offer critical analysis about various institutional and organizational tendencies to obscure power relations.
And if nothing else, it’s always better to err on the side of disclosure, to share writers’ and publications’ background information and interests early and often and as fully as possible. That’s much more preferable than having something come up that questions one’s credibility and independence, as I think Gold’s concerns about Hybrid Pedadogy and its relationship with Instructure serves to underscore.