About the Journal

Mission

The mission of The Dialog: A Journal for Inclusive Early Childhood Professionals is to promote the translation of research to practice in pursuit of meaningful inclusion for young children and their families across early childhood personnel preparation, practice, and policy.

The Dialog fulfills its mission by:

  • Disseminating high quality research that is accessible to all members of the early childhood community who support young children (prenatal through age eight) and their families,
  • Ensuring research is translated into actionable strategies in support of preservice and ongoing personnel preparation, inclusive practice, and policy, 
  • Centering the lived experiences of children, families, practitioners, and faculty/trainers, and
  • Providing an open forum to cultivate authentic partnerships across home, school, and community contexts by connecting families, researchers, preservice and ongoing professional development providers, students, and practitioners.

Focus and Scope

The Dialog solicits manuscripts that highlight evidence-based and research-supported practices that aim to produce positive outcomes for young children and their families in ways that reflect lived experiences and varied perspectives from across the early childhood context. Therefore, the journal welcomes manuscripts from various fields and those that explore a wide range of topics related to early childhood.

Topics of consideration include, but are not limited to:

  • Preservice preparation and/or ongoing personnel development
  • Inclusion, belonging, and equity
  • Inclusive strategies (e.g., Universal Design for learning (UDL), Differentiation, Embedded Instruction and Intervention)
  • Supporting child development across developmental domains and academic content areas
  • Early Childhood Mental Health
  • Family engagement, support, and resiliency
  • Parenting and caregiving 
  • Prenatal care and services
  • Intersectionality and Identity
  • Cultural, linguistic, and other aspects of diversity
  • Community issues (e.g., neighborhood violence, homelessness, resource management, funding streams, administration, supervision, accountability) 
  • Early childhood education 
  • Early intervention 
  • Early childhood special education
  • Collaboration and interdisciplinary practice
  • Authentic assessment and evaluation 
  • Curriculum and instruction 
  • Play
  • Critical reflection
  • Transitions
  • Psychology and psychiatry
  • Sociology
  • Pediatrics and family medicine
  • Public and allied health 
  • Nursing 
  • Social work
  • Anthropology
  • Legal and ethical issues
  • Systemic program issues
  • Advocacy and policy issues

The Dialog welcomes reports of original research as well as other manuscript types grounded in research such as conceptual articles, reviews of the literature, and Dialogs from the Field, descriptive articles rooted in practice and program development. All manuscripts submitted to The Dialog should clearly delineate applications to practice, personnel preparation, research, and/or policy. We are particularly interested in manuscripts that are the products of meaningful partnerships between members of the early childhood community. 

To intentionally support the effective translation of research to practice and preparation, authors of research manuscripts accepted for publication will be asked to create a separate research-to-practice product summarizing their research findings for use by practitioners, families, policy makers, and/or personnel preparation providers. This product will be subjected to editorial review and published in the same issue of The Dialog as the research article.

Peer Review Process

All articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and double blind review by at least two anonymous referees. 

Publication Frequency

The Dialog publishes three issues per year. 

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Sponsors

ISSN 3068-2266

To view our latest issue and to preview accepted articles that will appear in future issues, click here.

Journal History

Greg Powell, as director of the Research and Evaluation Division of the National Head Start Association (NHSA), started and edited NHSA Research Quarterly in 1997. In 1999, the NHSA Research Quarterly was renamed the NHSA Dialog: A Research-to-Practice Journal for the Early Intervention Field.  Greg Powell served as the first Editor. After a few years, Gregg recruited Faith Lamb-Parker who was then at Columbia University to serve as the journal's second editor.  In August 2002, Ben Allen succeeded Greg Powell as the Research and Evaluation Director at NHSA. Barbara Burns of the University of Kentucky succeeded Faith Lamb-Parker as its editor and served until 2007. Up until 2005, the journal was largely an in-house production, but Ben Allen, upon the advice of Dr. Edward Zigler at Yale University, sought out a major publisher for the journal to reduce production costs and broaden its readership domestically and internationally.  Under the sponsorship of NHSA, Ben Allen concluded a multi-year publication agreement with Taylor & Francis, LLC in 2006.  Richard Lambert of UNC Charlotte served as editor from 2008 - 2020.

NHSA sponsored the journal until 2012, Volume 15.  Starting with Volume 16, Issue 1, 2013, the journal became an open access online journal sponsored by the Center for Educational Measurement and Evaluation​ and published by J. Murrey Atkins Library Digital Publishing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC). In 2022, the name of the journal changed to, The Head Start Dialog: The Research-to-Practice Journal for the Early Childhood Field.

In 2024, a revitalization process was initiated and the journal welcomed submissions for a special issue on early childhood educator preparation for inclusion under the direction of Dr. Ann Mickelson who joined the journal in 2023 as editor. The response to the call was robust, underscoring the need for more outlets for this genre of research. 

As part of the revitalization process, the journal was renamed, The Dialog: A Journal for Inclusive Early Childhood Professionals in 2025 under the direction of Dr. Ann Mickelson as Editor-in-Chief. This new name was chosen to both honor the history of the journal and pave a path for the journal’s future aim of supporting preservice and ongoing early childhood personnel preparation.