3 Nicholas D. Hartlep & Monte Bute The Journal of Educational Foundations, 2017 Nicholas D. Hartlep is an assistant professor of urban education in the School of Urban Education and Monte Bute is an associate professor of sociology and social science in the Social Science Department, both at Metropolitan State University, Saint Paul, Minnesota. They serve as editor and associate editor respectively of The Journal of Educational Foundations. Their e-mail addresses are: nicholas.hartlep@metrostate.edu & monte. bute@metrostate.edu We are titling our inaugural issue of The Journal of Educational Foundations “Shaking the Foundations” because that is what we aim to accomplish as editors. But has not the subfield of foundations of education already been “shaken up”? Yes, if you consider only the disciplinary content of this area of study. According to Tutwiler et al. (2013), the purpose of the Foundations of Education is to develop critical, interpretive, and normative perspectives. They go on to state that its character and methods draw from numerous academic disciplines and that the field is interdisciplinary. According to Hartlep and Porfilio (2015), “over the years, the field of educational foundations has become more inclusive and more interdisciplinary” (p. 308). Wayne C. Booth (1963), an imposing figure in modern rhetoric, once asserted that every composition strikes a “rhetorical stance”—an author, a subject, and an audience. We agree that the subject matter of Foundations has already been shaken up. We aim to shake the field’s taken-for-granted-reality of who an academic author is, and who academic audiences are. We argue that it is time for Educational Foundations to change its rhetorical stance. We would like to “shake up” the revitalized Foundations by insisting that authors consider how knowledge is socially distributed. In his essay “The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge,” Schütz (1946) describes three ideal types: (1) the expert, (2) the person on the street, and (3) the well-informed citizen. Well-informed Shaking the Foundations Nicholas D. Hartlep & Monte Bute The Journal of Educational Foundations 2017,Vol. 30. No. 1-2-3-4, pp. 3-6 Copyright 2017 by Caddo Gap Press