A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our hearts. That’s the power of story.

—Marshall Ganz

This special issue of English Leadership Quarterly is guest edited by Dr. Hiawatha Smith and Dr. Tiffany A. Flowers. It seeks to highlight the leadership stories of both teachers and leaders in English education spaces. Stories present familiar information (Negrete & Lartigue, 2004), allowing listeners (and readers) to connect with, learn from, and build on the information shared. Stories allow authors to share their unique lived experiences, from challenges to successes. In this guest-edited issue, we want educators to discuss leadership in English education in non-traditional and traditional forms. We believe that leadership takes many forms. Leadership can include the teachers who volunteer to take on important committee work and the scholars who lead university departments in English education.

Our goal through this guest-edited issue is to elevate the voices of behind-the-scenes leaders and front-facing leaders working through some of the most tumultuous politics and celebrate their achievements, lessons learned, and wisdom. The editors of this guest issue want to amplify the voices of leaders doing everyday community work. Through this special issue, we wish to amplify the powerful and dynamic stories of various English teachers and leaders. We envision receiving solo-authored essays of approximately 1,000-2,000 words from teachers, academics, administrators, activists, and community organizers working in English Education.

We encourage authors to be creative in sharing their narrative stories. Authors should use the following guiding questions when creating their submission to the journal: Who are you as a leader, and how did you become the leader you are today? What opportunity prepared you for this experience in English spaces? How did you enter leadership? In what capacity do you lead? What has been a challenge you have experienced during your career?  How did it impact your career?  What has been a success you have experienced during your career?  How did it impact your career?  What is an untold, hidden piece of your English leadership?  What are often overlooked experiences of leadership?

References

Ganz, M. (2009). Why stories matter. Sojourners, 38(3), 16.

Negrete, A., & Lartigue, C. (2004). Learning from education to communicate science as a good story. Endeavour, 28(3), 120–124.

Email a copy of your manuscript to both guest editors by November 25,2025: Dr. Hiawatha Smith hiawatha.smith@uwrf.edu and Dr. Tiffany A. Flowers, tflowers@gsu.edu.

This special issue focuses on the leadership lessons we can learn from members who have participated in the Conference on English Leadership’s Emerging Leaders Fellowship (ELF) program. The ELF program was created, according to NCTE’s CEL, to provide “leadership support, mentoring, and networking opportunities for early career leaders of English language arts programs at the Kindergarten through university levels.” Beginning leaders are invited to collaborate with a mentor from a community of highly experienced English language arts leaders and scholars whose own work can be enriched through engagement with new ideas and school contexts. Current and past participants are encouraged to share their stories including what brought them to the ELF program, what they have gained from participating, and how they have applied their learning within their literacy leadership context. This issue will not take general submissions. Any ELF mentor or fellow (or previous participant) is invited to submit for this issue.

Possible prompts to guide submissions:

• How is leadership mentoring valuable to new leaders?
• What have you learned from serving as a leadership mentor?
• What elements of the ELF program have impacted you?
• What supports do new leaders need most?

Suggested length of submissions: 700–1000 words

To submit articles for consideration, please email jenelle.williams@oakland.k12.mi.us and lizlietz@gmail.com and attach your article as a Word document with appropriate APA 7 formatting.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, April 4, 2025.

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.

References

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.