Submission deadline: November 4, 2024

Recent issues of Language Arts and English Teaching: Practice and Critique focused on the intersections of anti-Black racism and anti-fat hate being promoted and exacerbated or challenged and countered in preK–12 English and literacy education. Additionally, NCTE sponsored a three-part webinar series throughout the spring of 2024 titled (a) Introduction to Anti-Fat Phobia and Anti-Blackness in K–12 Classrooms and Teacher Education, (b) Countering Racism and Anti-Fat Phobia, and (c) Radical Black Love to (Re)Imagine Fat in the ELA Classroom, respectively. While classroom teachers and teacher educators may be building the insights and abilities to address these issues, real change will be difficult to enact without the knowledge, support, and convictions of educational leaders.

Toward that end, this special issue of Education Leadership Quarterly seeks manuscripts that will address questions such as:  How can educational leaders support district, school, and classroom shifts towards love and affirmation for the fat body, recognizing its importance in fostering self-esteem and dismantling harmful stereotypes? How can leaders help transform educational institutions (childcare settings, K–12 schools, university programs) into sanctuary spaces for fat individuals navigating the complex intersections of race, gender, sexualities, abilities, languages, and religions? What strategies and approaches have been successful in addressing fatphobia in classrooms, schools, and districts? What role can texts, fiction and nonfiction, play in countering fatphobia and fostering love for the fat body?

For this issue, we seek perspectives that acknowledge the responsibility of educational leaders in addressing, resisting, and dismantling fat phobia. We consider preK–12 school principals, literacy coaches, district coordinators, state superintendents of education, community leaders, and college of education deans and department chairs as educational leaders. We are especially interested in work that employs a critical intersectional lens to analyze the underlying power dynamics at play, with a specific focus on size discrimination, as it pertains to issues of self-love, body image and body acceptance and then addresses the role of leaders in countering power dynamics that maintain fat-hate/bias.

Email a copy of your manuscript to both guest editors by November 4, 2024: Dr. Dywanna Smith, dysmith@claflin.edu, and Dr. Kenesha Johnson, kenejohnson@claflin.edu

October 2024: Leading with State Affiliates

No longer accepting submissions.

This issue focuses on the leadership lessons we can learn from state affiliates of NCTE. State affiliates, according to NCTE, work “to improve the teaching and learning of English language arts directly in your community.” Our current moment of book bans and curricular gag orders are coming from state levels as are battles over budgeting and other issues that directly impact teachers’ lives and livelihood. Therefore, state affiliates have the potential to be organizations that prompt change within local contexts. This issue seeks to honor the work that state affiliates enact as well as the knowledge that state affiliates generate. State affiliate leaders will share insights and lessons learned from their time leading a state affiliate for English and literacy leaders. This issue will not take general submissions. Any state affiliate leader (or previous leader) is invited to submit for this issue.

August 2024: Leading toward a Reimagined English Language Arts

No longer accepting submissions.

This issue is focused on how English department chairs and other literacy leaders can create new visions of English language arts teaching. Traditional English language arts teaching entrenches inequitable hierarchies that continue to deny students from marginalized communities a just schooling experience. School leaders, including department chairs and other literacy leaders, can play a pivotal role in reimagining what English language arts looks like as a discipline and how teaching in the discipline is enacted. To that end, this issue is concerned with questions such as: How can English department chairs and literacy leaders work to redefine English language arts from the ground up? How are new teachers building new visions of English language arts teaching early in their careers? How are writers, community leaders, movements, and activists informing how to imagine English language arts in our contemporary moment? How does English teaching respond to the shifting technological landscape? These are just some questions that could be considered for this issue. Manuscripts co-written by English teachers and other educators, broadly and inclusively defined, are highly encouraged for this issue.

February 2024: Exploring Pathways That Lead to Queer Composing

No longer accepting submissions.

. . . schools and classrooms that uphold hegemonic ideologies by privileging Standard English as well as heteronormative ways of being (e.g., discipline practices, dress codes) may alienate students who are linguistically diverse, who are from minority populations, who are gender nonconforming, and/ or who identify (or are perceived) as lesbian, gay, transgender, or queer.”

—Latrise Johnson

This special issue of ELQ is co-edited by Rae Oviatt and Emily Meixner and examines the role literacy leaders can play in supporting and fostering engagement with queer composing in K–12 teaching. Identified by embodied forms of communication, multimodality, and centering of queer, particularly Queer of Color, experiences, queer composing is a vehicle for reimagining and challenging dominant modes of writing, specifically print-based academic essays.  As stated in NCTE’s most recent Position Statement on Writing Instruction in School (2022), “NCTE advocates for writing instruction that builds on students’ strengths, that values their many ways of using language, that promotes a broad view of what constitutes ‘text,’ and that promotes young people’s voices and purposes for writing (and composing) within authentic contexts (and across a variety of modes).”

In our current era of on-going state-sponsored attacks on LGBTQIA+ youth, increased book bans targeting text by and about LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities, as well as policy attacks on healthcare for trans youth, schools and classrooms must be spaces in which students’ complex intersectional identities are nurtured, reflected, and valued. However, instructional change requires a critical rethinking of the kinds of texts that are available and taught in K–12 schools. It also requires a shift from thinking about print text and teaching writing to nurturing and facilitating multimodal composing as multimodality inherently embraces complex, diverse ways of communicating and making meaning.

In this volume of ELQ, we move beyond the confines of the site of a single classroom to highlight leadership around textual composing that expands and challenges the boundaries of how, what, and why teachers and students create texts. This issue seeks submissions from literacy leaders, broadly defined (including community leaders or GSA sponsors, for example), that respond to the following questions: How can literacy leaders encourage teachers and students to envision composing as opportunities to question language, identity, and genre? How can literacy leaders model embodied composing processes that encourage the inclusion of queer and multimodal texts? How can literacy leaders model composing as a tool for critical   self-reflection with and among teachers?

*Given the topic of this volume’s call, we welcome submissions that are multi-modal, multi-genre, and expressive as well as research articles and analytic essays.

Works Cited

Johnson, L. P. (2017). Writing the self: Black queer youth challenge heteronormative ways of being in an after-school writing club. Research in the Teaching of English, 52(1), 13–33.