Kimkong Heng
The University of Queensland
Brisbane, Australia
(On behalf of the CEF team)
Welcome to the first issue of the Cambodian Journal of Educational Research (CJER). On behalf of the team at the Cambodian Education Forum (CEF) and the editorial board of CJER, we are extremely excited to launch the first issue of the journal.
This journal demonstrates our humble yet ambitious attempt to contribute to building a vibrant research culture in Cambodia. We have discussed among our team a plan to establish CJER since December 2020 when we published our first edited volume, entitled “English language teaching, education, and online learning in Cambodia during COVID-19: Perspectives from practitioners and researchers”.
Initially, we thought of announcing a call for papers for the journal, but we did not have sufficient time and resources to seriously work on this publication. However, the idea of establishing a Cambodia-based journal to provide a publication platform to support young or inexperienced Cambodian writers or researchers has always been with us. This vision has inspired us to start the Cambodian Education Forum and continue to support Cambodian writers, especially young ones, to write and publish.
Our approach to CJER is realistic and inclusive. We will publish both full-length and short articles; however, at present, we focus only on short articles as we do not have the necessary resources to support the publication of full-length articles. We hope we can expand our capacity in the near future.
We will publish two issues of CJER per year. One will be in June and the other in December of each calendar year. The release of this issue is a bit late, but it is always better late than never.
In this inaugural issue, we put together the articles that the Cambodian Education Forum has published prior to July 2021, as any articles that will be published between July and December 2021 and meet CJER’s submission guidelines will be included in the second issue of the journal (i.e., Volume 1, Number 2).
There are a total of 11 articles in this first issue. Some of these articles were published in 2020; the others in 2021. Three articles focus on learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, two about professional development and English pronunciation learning and teaching, the other three articles about issues related to higher education, and the last three about general issues in education.
As always, CEF aims to contribute to fostering and promoting a culture of research and publication in Cambodia. We are particularly interested and committed to supporting young or novice Cambodian writers and researchers to write and publish their work. We believe that by supporting the new generation of Cambodian writers, we will contribute positively to nurturing a healthy research culture in Cambodia.
While we acknowledge our limitations in both editorial expertise and copyediting skills, we have tried and will try our best to ensure the quality of CJER and other publications by CEF. Any unintentional errors are, however, ours. In this regard, we look forward to any comments or constructive feedback to help enhance the quality of this journal and our other publications.
Finally, we hope our efforts and commitment to promoting a research and publication culture in Cambodia will bring about a positive impact on how research and publication are perceived in Cambodian society. We strongly hope that our hard work will inspire other stakeholders in Cambodia to devise plans and strategies to contribute to building a thriving research culture in the Kingdom of Cambodia.
The author
Kimkong Heng is currently an Australia Awards scholar pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is a co-founder and lead editor of the Cambodian Education Forum and a visiting senior research fellow at the Cambodia Development Center. He has published several journal articles and over 100 short articles in local and international outlets. Email: kimkongheng@gmail.com.
Cambodian Education Forum 