The Journal of Character Education has a successful history of publishing special issues—including guest-edited special issues—and this 2023 Volume 19 publication is another excellent example of that. We collaborated with two rising stars in the field—Drs. Jennifer P. Agans and Andrea Vest Ettekal—to explore character development in the context of youth sport. Their call for proposals for the special issue was an outstanding success in regard to submissions. In fact, given the breadth of quality submissions that made it through our review process, we decided to publish Volume 19 as a “double issue,” including both Issues 1 and 2 for 2023. Hence the brief delay in getting this issue into your hands. We hope you enjoy it.
Drs. Agans and Ettekal thoughtfully steered this issue and its authors to a meaningful contribution exploring character development in and through youth sport. With six empirical articles and three practitioners’ voices, this issue includes explorations into the roles of coaches, of parents, of breadth and depth of youth sport enrollment; it considers ideas related to purpose, integrity, self-esteem, and moral engagement; it reviews contexts including youth sport, club sport, and intercollegiate sport; and introduces novel and interesting perspectives, programs, and models for sport as a context for character development.
More exciting news for the JCE is that we have begun to work with our publisher, Information Age Publishing, to begin to offer options for Open Access articles. We will provide further details as we move forward.
We’ll let the guest editors take it away from here. Enjoy!
