Technology has made the world a much smaller place. Where once we may have been limited to learning in local places, we can take learning to the global stage. Even local challenges can be linked to global issues. And by moving into local communities, we can assist students in discovering why the wicked problems of the world matter and why they should care. We can demonstrate to students how tackling a problem at the local level can impact the larger world. And through these investigations, students can expand their perspectives beyond their own lived experiences and cultures. So, in this issue, we ask you to contribute ways you’ve shifted learning to global spaces. How has technology assisted you in taking students to places they’ve never been before? In what ways have you used virtual or augmented reality to transport students to new experiences? How have you aided students in discovering global influences on local contexts? What role do global texts play in your classroom, and how do you use them to investigate their places of origin? How have you integrated the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals? How have you connected your students to students in other places?

Manuscripts no longer accepted.

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Field Trips

For our Field Trips section we are looking to publish a series of short episodes or illustrations  about ways in which you’ve used space creatively to engage your students in lasting and memorable learning opportunities. How do you use technology to bring the world to your students? What texts or activities do you use to zoom in and zoom out? Who have you partnered with to open up the world to your students?

Submissions Due: September 15, 2024

Too often, schools place different disciplines in silos. And while the middle school model encourages cross- and interdisciplinary learning, content-specific tests, educational policies, and traditional curricular models encourage content-specific teaching and learning. Yet, the world doesn’t divide up disciplines. One cannot engage in a scientific experiment without utilizing literacy skills, and interpreting geographic data requires fluency in math. So, how do we, as educators, design interdisciplinary learning experiences? How do we take students out into the world so they can identify interdisciplinary connections? In this issue, we invite you to reimagine an ELA classroom that is not solely ELA. To this end, we ask you to share how you integrate other disciplines into your curriculum. What role does problem-based or project-based learning play in your year? How does place connect to these projects? How do you collaborate and design units with teachers in different disciplines? with experts from different disciplines? What kinds of essential and driving questions encourage students to explore concepts from multiple disciplines and multiple spaces?

Manuscripts no longer accepted.

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Field Trips

For our Field Trips section we are looking to publish a series of short episodes or illustrations  about ways in which you’ve used space creatively to engage your students in lasting and memorable learning opportunities. Who is your number one ally in another department? How has your partnership helped expand opportunities for your students? How has your collaboration with this ally changed the landscape of your school?

Submissions Due: November 15, 2024

Dreams. Everyone has them—unless they don’t. As Luvvie Ajayi Jones writes in her blog post, “We need to keep dreaming, even when it feels impossible.” Here’s why: Dreams raise our hopes, and too often we are afraid of being disappointed, so we choose to dream small or not at all. Yet dreams are the basis of change. And collaborative dreaming can make us unstoppable. We know the language arts are a place to foster and to expand our dreams. Through them, we can, as Jones urges, “give ourselves permission to be who we want to be, even if we don’t have the blueprint yet.” So how, as ELA teachers, can we prepare our students to “draw the map, so someone that comes behind us won’t get lost”? In this issue, we invite you to dream and collaborate with us as we imagine ELA classrooms that embody goodness. How do you integrate maps in a way that allows students to develop goals in imaginative ways? How do you let imaginations run wild so that students can achieve previously unimaginable accomplishments? How do you model your own dreaming, giving your students permission to do the same? How do you engage students in acts of meaningful listening so that they may dream together? In what ways do you use literature and writing to illustrate the power of “what if?” Ultimately, as Jones states, “When our dreams are big, we’re telling the folks who know us that they don’t have to be small either. When our dreams come true, we’re expanding the worlds of others because now they know theirs can too.” How do you dream big?

Submissions due: December 15, 2024

Minor focuses on the need to develop thought sanctuaries—which include thought partners, rest, and engagement in multiliteracies—as a way to nourish and nurture positive human connections. Thought is essential to the success of the language arts: reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and representing. Upon reflecting upon Minor’s work, we wonder: how much emphasis is put on thought in our ELA classrooms? Are we so caught up in production and meeting standards that we neglect creating the thought-sanctuaries needed to make real change? We invite you to muse alongside us. How can we privilege thought in our learning spaces? What roles do thought partners play, and how do we develop these connections? How do we allow time for rest so that our students feel refreshed and capable of new ways of thinking? In what ways do we use multiliteracies to develop thinking? How do we ensure all students’ needs are met so that they are free to engage in thought? What ways do we encourage joyful curiosity? How do we underscore flexible thinking, and how can we be willing to work within loose or absent agendas?

Submissions due: March 15, 2025

In their work on creative problem solving, the design thinking company IDEO stresses the importance of rituals to develop a culture of collaboration—and collaboration will need to be fully developed in order to build a just world. Minor also stresses the need for school communities to have “opportunities to contribute materials to the build in the form of knowledge, culture, and resources that work toward shared values.” Rituals, she notes, will contribute to making the connections needed to engage in such building. As ELA teachers, we often study rituals in the stories we teach, but how often do we actively build rituals with our students? And how do we help our students see the benefits of the rituals we do engage in? In this issue, we invite you to consider the role of rituals in ELA classrooms. How can we use rituals to connect our work in the classroom to topics and issues that are meaningful to students? How do we consider multiple perspectives when developing rituals? How can rituals help students take ownership over their work or develop new skills and perspectives? What rituals do you use to build trust in the learning community? What opportunities do you provide for students to expect messiness, to engage in trial and error, to fail—and how do rituals assist in this process?

Submissions due: June 15, 2025

Minor reminds us that “to move forward, we must look back.” If we are going to teach fiercely in order to bring about joy, justice, and agency, we must have a strong and clear understanding of where we’ve been and the forces and factors that have impacted our histories and systems. Yet, she also cautions us that we cannot reflect upon new ideas and information without thoughtfulness. It can be difficult to implement learning experiences we haven’t had ourselves, making this work challenging. Thus, we have to build our mental models for joy and justice in school by “developing rituals that build the muscles for collaboration, nourishment, building, and reflection.” And we have to continually remind ourselves that alone, we cannot determine what is just or brings joy to others. So how can we, as educators, teach in a way that brings joy, justice, and agency to our students as well as ourselves? How do you help students understand that justice is a journey rather than a destination? In what ways do you build students’ social literacy skills—“their ability to determine when to say what, with whom to speak, and what the general affect of the communal space might be”? How do you teach students to interrogate the media they consume on a daily basis so that they have a better sense of the world’s strengths and its failings? How do you build racial literacy into your pedagogy so that students begin to recognize acts that other those in their communities? When do you provide opportunities for students to experience somatic literacies so that they recognize how their bodies are reacting to environments? How do you infuse joy into learning? How are you providing students with opportunities to define justice? How do you give agency to your students?

Submissions due: August 15, 2025

Centering Learners as Explorers of Place (December 2024)

The rise of the accountability movement has led to an increased reliance on boxed curricula, and no matter how many included texts represent diverse perspectives, boxed curricula will always be content-centered, not learner-centered. When engaging with these materials, students often struggle to see themselves in work they complete. This is because learners are connected to place, not content. How can we assist learners in understanding how place has shaped their experiences? If tied to boxed curricula, how do we help students connect these texts and lessons to their personal experiences? We invite you to share ways you have centered students in your learning designs. How have you co-constructed learning experiences with students? What strategies have you used for personalized learning? How have you emphasized competencies over grades or even standards? How have you assisted students in finding and developing their passions and talents? What roles do goal setting and reflection have in your classroom? How have you centered students in exploring place?

Manuscripts no longer accepted.

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Field Trips

For our Field Trips section we are looking to publish a series of short episodes or illustrations about ways in which you’ve used space creatively to engage your students in lasting and memorable learning opportunities. Where do you go to explore with your students? How did that opportunity to explore change the direction of your teaching? When did a greater understanding of place change the trajectory of your students?

Manuscripts no longer accepted.

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Experiencing the Community as Classroom (September 2024)

Learning can happen anytime and anywhere. Rather than limiting our lesson design to the classroom, integrating the community into learning experiences can deepen student learning. How can we assist students in learning more about their communities while also learning the language arts? How do we build belonging by partnering with community members? How do we structure experiences within the community to assist students in building social capital? In this issue, we invite you to share how you assist students in experiencing the community as an important place of learning. How do you nurture students’ curiosities through community explorations? In what ways have you partnered with community members, programs, and organizations? What challenges exist in the community that students have helped to address through your curriculum? How have you used field trips to extend student learning about a concept? What resources have you co-authored with community members, providing students with authentic audiences? What other ways have you leveraged the community as a classroom?

Manuscripts no longer accepted.

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Field Trips

For our Field Trips section we are looking to publish a series of short episodes or illustrations about ways in which you’ve used space creatively to engage your students in lasting and memorable learning opportunities. How have you used digital or analogue tools to bring a community-centered experience into your classroom? How have your students met and interacted with people and organizations to expand their perspectives?

Manuscripts no longer accepted.

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Speculating from the Middle

Volume 31 of Voices from the Middle draws from the work of Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia who offer a new approach for blending literacy and civic education in their upcoming book Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom.

Mirra and Garcia draw upon the lessons of speculative fiction to create a vision of speculative civic literacies that positions all teachers as world-builders who assist students in interrogating the world as it currently exists and in imagining and innovating toward new realities. They argue that amid all of the challenges facing public schools today, from the pandemic to political polarization, the failure of our systems to imagine new educational possibilities is, in fact, the greatest challenge of them all. Mirra and Garcia propose that education should be a tool used to design new futures and that youth must be respected as experts in their communities who are ready and able to create equitable social change. We agree! This volume year, we want to speculate alongside them and examine ways teachers can and do enact their five commitments of world-building civic education: inquiry, storytelling, networking, imagination, and advocacy. Through these commitments, we can empower young people to build a joyful, just, and interconnected world.

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Building Change through Advocacy (May 2024)

Advocacy allows students to move from speculation to action. As Mirra and Garcia remind us, schools are connected to communities, which means that civic learning and engagement cannot be confined to the classroom. Students must be encouraged to take their ideas into the neighborhoods to which they belong. So, how do we, as educators, weave advocacy into the fabric of our classrooms? How do we help our students enact their imaginations to make change in the world? In this issue, we are advocating for a new approach to pedagogy that centers students as changemakers. Thus, we ask you to share how you integrate advocacy into your curriculum. How do you provide students with avenues for communicating their ideas with stakeholders in the community? Where do you model advocacy for your students? What role do youth activists play in your curriculum, and how do you help students see themselves using their voices in similar ways? How do you use genres such as protest art to model various ways to advocate within the community? What changes have been made due to students’ actions?

Manuscripts no longer accepted.

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Stories of Advocacy

In this issue, we celebrate stories of advocacy. Where have students found platforms to push for change? What stories can you share about students’ experiences with advocacy? Who can you highlight? What did you or your students learn?  We invite you to share those stories in short, narrative pieces of 500–750 words.

Manuscripts no longer accepted.