Focus and Scope
Focus and Scope
Journal of Transformative Learning and Social Innovation (JATI)
Aims
JATI is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal that advances scholarship on how transformative learning generates, enables, and sustains social innovation. The journal publishes original research that explains how learning processes contribute to new ideas, practices, relationships, institutions, and collaborative solutions capable of producing meaningful educational and societal change.
JATI connects educational scholarship with social change across diverse cultural and geographical contexts. It serves researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers, and emerging scholars worldwide.
Focus
JATI is interested in the intersection of two fields: transformative learning and social innovation. We welcome work that is theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous, and that goes beyond describing programs to explain how, why, and under what conditions learning leads to change.
Scope
JATI welcomes submissions on the following core themes:
1. Transformative learning
Theories, processes, conditions, and outcomes of transformative learning among individuals, groups, organizations, and communities, including critical reflection, perspective transformation, and changes in practice.
2. Social innovation in education
New models, practices, programs, and arrangements that meet educational and social needs more effectively, inclusively, or sustainably than existing approaches.
3. Co-creation and community-engaged learning
Participatory, collaborative, and partnership-based approaches in which schools, universities, communities, and other stakeholders create knowledge and solutions together, including service learning and community-based research.
4. Institutional and policy transformation
How schools, universities, and education systems change, and how policies, governance, and leadership enable or constrain innovation.
5. Scaling and sustainability of educational innovation
Pathways, barriers, and enabling conditions for innovations to spread, be adapted across contexts, and endure over time.
6. Evidence of societal impact
Conceptual frameworks, methods, and empirical evidence demonstrating change beyond the classroom, in practices, institutions, communities, and society.
Cross-Cutting Themes
The following themes are welcome when they are explicitly examined as mechanisms, contexts, or outcomes of transformative learning and social innovation:
- Digital technologies and artificial intelligence
- Sustainability and education for sustainable development
- Inclusion, equity, and social justice
- Lifelong learning
- Community empowerment
Out of Scope
To help authors judge the fit of their work, the following kinds of submissions are generally not within the scope of JATI:
- Studies on technology, AI, sustainability, inclusion, or lifelong learning that have no clear connection to transformative learning or social innovation
- Purely descriptive reports of programs or activities without a theoretical framework or analysis of how change occurs
- Studies whose relevance is limited to a single local context without insights that can inform wider scholarship or practice
- Opinion pieces, promotional material, or work lacking methodological rigor
Subject Areas
Education · Adult and lifelong learning · Higher education · Community development · Social innovation · Educational policy and leadership · Sustainability education · Inclusive education · Digital and AI-enhanced learning · Participatory and action research
Methodological Openness
JATI welcomes quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, design-based, action research, case study, and systematic review approaches, as long as the design is appropriate for the research questions and applied rigorously.
