Submission deadline January 29, 2024

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.

October 2023: Early Career Educators of Color Speak to School Leaders