Submission Deadline: August 15, 2023

. . . 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.

Submission deadline: January 15, 2023

“Using literature, writing, and the English classroom as sites of restoration and peacemaking should not be a revolutionary concept, considering the climate of zero-tolerance and punitive policies that can dictate American public-school culture.”

                                                        —Maisha T. Winn

This issue is focused on how English department chairs and other literacy leaders can work within and outside schools to challenge punitive disciplinary practices and harmful curricular policies in order to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools continue to be spaces where carceral logics, which normalize the valuing of punishment over community and accountability, guide daily interactions across relationships. School leaders, including department chairs and other literacy leaders, can play a pivotal role in disrupting these logics and reimagining schools as places where community and healing can flourish. To that end, this issue is concerned with questions such as: How can English department chairs and literacy leaders disrupt harmful policies and inequitable practices? How can teachers, both individually and collectively, work to create restorative practices and policies within a department? How are new teachers enacting restorative practices in their classrooms? How are prison abolitionists and other radical movements and writers informing teaching and teacher leadership? What can classrooms and schools free of carceral logics look like? How does leadership that is concerned with fostering healing rather than enacting punishment get practiced? 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.

Reference
Winn, M. T. (2013). Towards a restorative English education. Research in the Teaching of English, 48(1), 126–136.

April 2023: Leading toward New Collaborations and Coalitions

No longer accepting submissions.

Families and caregivers are also incredible assets. They often raise powerful voices when it comes to addressing the needs of a school. . . . Together, partnerships between teachers and caregivers further support the case for how ABAR [anti-bias, anti-racist] must be ingrained in the culture of your school, as there are shared values between school and home.

—Liz Kleinrock

This issue is focused on how collaboration can foster new ways of imagining English teaching, literacy learning, and leading within schools. Collaboration offers not only new ways of approaching our work, but new angles to reconsider and revise our ideas about how our work operates. At its most fruitful, collaboration can allow us to complicate and broaden beliefs we have about teaching and leading within English spaces. To that end, this issue wonders: What new ideas might be generated from collaboration with educators across grade levels, disciplines, and institutions? For instance, how can secondary English teachers learn from elementary teachers? How can English teachers and other content area teachers develop cross-disciplinary knowledge? How can English teachers and departments partner with other institutions that educate young people such as libraries, after-school programs, and co-curriculars? How can English departments lead partnerships with caregivers within communities? 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.

Reference
Kleinrock, L. (2021). Start here, start now: A guide to antibias and antiracist work in your school community. Heinemann.

February 2023: Leading to Support and Learn with New Teachers

No longer accepting submissions.

[New teachers] have exactly as much right to speak and be involved in [their] first year as [they] do in [their] twentieth. Just as experience should be listened to, so should the fresh perspective of a teacher early in their career.

—Tom Rademacher

This issue of English Leadership Quarterly is focused on supporting new teachers as they enter our field and departments while simultaneously amplifying the wisdom and ideas of new English teachers. This issue seeks to be a dialogue between new teachers and teachers with more experience. Rather than replicating a hierarchy based on experience, this issue intends to discuss how department chairs and literacy leaders can support new teachers, and how new teachers can inform the work of department chairs and literacy leaders. What can the experiences of first year teachers tell us about how to approach the work of leading a department? How can teacher mentorship for new teachers be positioned as a learning partnership between mentors and mentees? What do department chairs and literacy leaders need to know about being a new teacher in our current moment? What do new teachers need the most from department chairs and literacy leaders? These are just some questions that could be considered for this issue. Manuscripts co-written by new teachers and/or mentor teachers, department chairs, and teacher educators are highly encouraged for this issue.

Reference
Rademacher, T. (2017). It won’t be easy: An exceedingly honest (and slightly unprofessional) love letter to teaching. University of Minnesota Press.

October 2022: Leading for Text Selection in Contested and Turbulent Times

No longer accepting submissions.

Feeling supported, feeling valued, and feeling empowered to place their students’ needs first through such actions such as intentional text selection are key elements in keeping ELA teachers in the classroom, affecting and inspiring the future leaders of our nation. Especially in our country’s current challenging and often divisive climate, it seems even more important that teachers feel free to choose texts that will help their students to critically engage with current events and topics that are often polarizing, such as race relations, socioeconomic challenges, and immigration policies and practices.

—Janine J. Darragh and Ashley S. Boyd

This issue of English Leadership Quarterly is concerned with the text selection process. Given the importance of department chairs and literacy leaders in selecting texts, this issue seeks to understand how text selection processes can be expanded, critiqued, and reimagined in our contemporary political moment. How can we expand the types of texts we teach to engage in cross-textual conversations with students? How can we pair new texts with new forms of assessment? How do we critically analyze what we teach in curricular units in order to make changes? How can we expand ideas and definitions of “texts” in ELA curriculum to include multimodal texts as well as new, emerging types of texts? How do we select texts that honor the realities of historically marginalized communities without centering and replicating trauma? How do we select texts at a time in which some states are passing de facto curricular bans on texts that address historical and contemporary oppression? These are just some questions that could be considered for this issue.

Reference
Darragh, J. J., & Boyd, A. S. (2019). Text selection: Perceptions of novice vs. veteran teachers. Action in Teacher Education, 41(1), 61–78.

August 2022: Designing and Leading Equity and Social Justice-Oriented Professional Development and Learning

No longer accepting submissions.

[Teachers] must also feel agentive and equipped to identify the features of professional development that do or do not support their development of [social justice] educational practices and be able to suggest and initiate alternative designs for their professional learning.

—Allison Skerrett, Amber Warrington, and Thea Williamson, English Education
Generative Principles for Professional Learning for Equity-Oriented Urban English Teachers

This first issue of English Leadership Quarterly for incoming editor Henry “Cody” Miller is concerned with professional development and learning that seeks to challenge curricular, pedagogical, and systemic inequities in our classrooms and schools. What does professional development/learning centered on equity and social justice look like in practice? How can professional development/learning lead us to develop practices that challenge racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, along with other forms of oppression? How do we support new teachers and teacher candidates in developing equity and social justice practices? How can teacher educators work with teacher leaders to construct professional development/learning that challenges inequities in our field? How can challenging traditional, thus limited, ideas around professional development/learning create more equitable teaching practices? What does grassroots, teacher-lead professional development/learning look like?

Reference
Skerrett, A., Warrington, A., & Williamson, T. (2018). Generative principles for professional learning for equity-oriented urban English teachers. English Education, 50(2), 116–46.