Calls for Manuscripts
Upcoming Language Arts Themes
Editors Rick Coppola, Sandra L. Osorio, and Rebecca Woodard offer the following calls for manuscripts. Questions for the editors may be directed to NCTE.LAjournal@gmail.com. All articles should be submitted through the Editorial Manager site.
Special topic issue edited by Rebecca Woodard and Haeny Yoon
Submission deadline: October 15, 2023
Art has the possibility to engender new ways of thinking and open up solutions to today’s most pressing social issues. In a world materially mediated in physical and digital spaces, we wonder how educators and scholars have understood the intersection of art, research, and teaching in their classrooms and communities. For this issue, we are interested in how researchers and teachers mobilize arts-based methods and practices to reimagine their own work with young people. Questions to consider include: How have the arts (e.g., poetry, collage, drawing, tracing, music) reconceptualized school spaces via curriculum, pedagogy, materiality, and engagement? How are the arts used to support learning across disciplines? How might arts-based methods expand and influence research questions, data collection, and analysis? How can arts-based pedagogies and methods intervene in the sociopolitics of contemporary society? For this issue, we seek articles highlighting the generative potential of art as liberatory practice, particularly in addressing issues of inequity and injustice.
Submission deadline: January 5, 2024
Human beings are not living on the planet sustainably, and the consequences are not being felt equitably. To increase awareness of climate change as an urgent, contemporary, socio-ecological challenge, climate education needs to occur in elementary schools and across disciplines. In fact, NCTE (2019) has a Resolution on Literacy Teaching on Climate Change that notes particular ways literacy educators and teacher educators can contribute, including by “evaluating curricular texts for scientific credibility” and leading “students to engage thoughtfully with texts focusing on social and political debates surrounding climate change.” For this issue, we’re interested in highlighting the various ways elementary educators and teacher educators are addressing climate change and climate justice in our classrooms, particularly through the English language arts. Some questions to consider include: What children’s literature can be used to explore climate change and climate justice? What English language arts skills can be fostered through climate learning? What kinds of interdisciplinary projects can support climate learning and action with children? What are children and youths’ perspectives on climate learning in schools? In what ways are educators, youth, and communities working together to foster climate learning, action, and justice, both within and beyond classroom contexts?
Submission deadline: February 15, 2024
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) youth continue to endure discrimination in their everyday lives. Coupled with the societal movement into spaces where seemingly settled civil rights are under attack, we are struck by the wave of state-level efforts targeting LGBTQIA+ youth—including criminalizing healthcare for trans youth, barring access to appropriate facilities such as restrooms, restricting trans students’ ability to fully participate in school and sports programs, and adopting laws that ban access to texts and instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity. For this issue, we are looking for submissions that adopt critical lenses to embrace and take up queer theories, exploring topics that center the lives of the LGBTQIA+ community. We hope these works will reach beyond a focus on inclusion of LGBTQIA+ identities and stretch toward criticality, such as interrogating the ways that gender norms can be dangerous and harmful. For this issue, we are interested in perspectives that demonstrate a shared responsibility for grappling with this work, understanding the heavy lifting does not solely rest with those who identify as queer. Further, we are especially interested in work that reflects the adoption of intersectional lenses, paying close attention to the processes of privileging and othering and how those dynamics shift depending on the participants and the context.
Submission deadline: April 15, 2024
For this unthemed issue, we invite Feature Article and Perspectives on Practice submissions that offer a variety of viewpoints and visions related to language arts across multiple settings and modalities. What topics, concerns, or issues do you think are important to today’s readers of Language Arts? What kinds of theoretical lenses have you applied to your inquiry work to increase our collective understanding of language arts instruction? How does your research illustrate the range of ways in which young people are engaged with the language arts? What trends do you see in the field of language arts? What innovative literacy practices do you see in the diverse spaces of classrooms and community settings? Within a digital age, how are our understandings of children’s literature, writing instruction, and literacy learning shifting? These are just a few of the many questions that can be explored in this issue. Join us in crafting an assortment of articles that helps to expand our viewpoints and visions about language arts.
November 2024: Visions & Viewpoints
No longer accepting submissions
For this unthemed issue, we invite Feature Article and Perspectives on Practice submissions that offer a variety of viewpoints and visions related to language arts across multiple settings and modalities. What topics, concerns, or issues do you think are important to today’s readers of Language Arts? What kinds of theoretical lenses have you applied to your inquiry work to increase our collective understanding of language arts instruction? How does your research illustrate the range of ways in which young people are engaged with the language arts? What trends do you see in the field of language arts? What innovative literacy practices do you see in the diverse spaces of classrooms and community settings? Within a digital age, how are our understandings of children’s literature, writing instruction, and literacy learning shifting? These are just a few of the many questions that can be explored in this issue. Join us in crafting an assortment of articles that helps to expand our viewpoints and visions about language arts.
September 2024: A Critical Stance toward Children’s Literature
No longer accepting submissions
For this issue we seek Feature Articles and Perspectives on Practice submissions that explore the promise of children’s literature for representing and including children that have been marginalized in many ELA curricula. Some questions to consider are: How can educators make sure we are seeing and honoring all our students and their multiple identities? How do you use children’s literature reflective of various identity groups (e.g., Latinx, Black, LGBTQIA+, dis/ability)? What narratives are being included or excluded? How can children’s literature be used to push back against ablism and xenophobia? How do elementary educators put read-alouds to work to create inclusive, critically literate classrooms? What are the limitations, possibilities, and/or potential challenges of using diverse books? Join us in putting together an issue that will give us much to consider in regard to the promise of children’s literature.
July 2024: Fostering Civic Reasoning and Discourse
No longer accepting submissions
The increased polarization felt across political, societal, and moral dimensions has deeply affected our collective ability to engage in civic reasoning and discourse. Schools and other places of learning have taken a central role in this contentious debate. A recent report by Lee et al. with the National Academy of Education (2021) poses the following question: “How [can we], at multiple levels of society, strive to work together to address our collective needs”? For this issue, we seek Feature Articles and Perspectives on Practice submissions that explore how you are preparing students with developmentally appropriate skills, practices, and dispositions to be fully informed and engaged citizens. Questions we’re thinking about include: How are you supporting students in sorting through and evaluating endless amounts of digital information? What spaces are you creating for students to understand multiple viewpoints and dialogue across differences in important societal issues (e.g., racism, climate change, the pandemic, economic disparity, etc.)? What does it mean to prepare students for democratic citizenship during these times? What sorts of literacies can support civic reasoning and discourse? What responsibility do we share across content areas to prepare young people to be fully engaged and informed citizens of their community and the larger world?
Lee, C. D., White, G., & Dong, D. (Eds.). (2021). Executive summary. Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse, Committee on Civic Reasoning and Discourse. Washington, DC: National Academy of Education.
May 2024: Honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Communities, Voices, and Experiences
No longer accepting submissions
There has been a dramatic rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. While Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have “long struggled for belonging, safety, and equity in the United States . . . this struggle has reached a new level.” The editors’ home state, Illinois, has recently signed one of the first laws to mandate teaching Asian American history in schools. For this issue, we seek Feature Articles and Perspectives on Practice submissions that explore AAPI communities, voices, and experiences, particularly related to elementary schooling. Some questions to consider include: How are elementary teachers decentering whiteness in their curriculum on a daily basis, including through the use of AAPI literature? How are educators honoring and uplifting the voices, experiences, languages, and stories of AAPI communities as a classroom norm? How do educators teach about the diversity, history, and contributions to the world’s knowledge from AAPI communities? How do teachers support students to be critically conscious and act against Asian American hate? How are educators—and children—fostering solidarity with AAPI communities and across communities of color? Join us in crafting an issue that honors AAPI communities, voices, and experiences.
March 2024: Viewpoints & Visions
No longer accepting submissions
For this unthemed issue, we invite Feature Article and Perspectives on Practice submissions that offer a variety of viewpoints and visions related to language arts across multiple settings and modalities. What topics, concerns, or issues do you think are important to today’s readers of Language Arts? What kinds of theoretical lenses have you applied to your inquiry work to increase our collective understandings of language arts instruction? How does your research illustrate the range of ways in which young people are engaged with the language arts? What trends do you see in the field of language arts? What innovative literacy practices do you see in the diverse spaces of classrooms and community settings? Within a digital age, how are our understandings of children’s literature, writing instruction, and literacy learning shifting? These are just a few of the many questions that can be explored in this issue. Join us in crafting an assortment of articles that helps to expand our viewpoints and visions about language arts.
January 2024: Cultivating Inclusive Classrooms That Honor Difference and Dis/Ability
No longer accepting submissions
Disability studies in education (DSE) is an interdisciplinary area of scholarship that situates “cognitive, embodied, and communicative differences as part of the natural spectrum of human diversity” (Collins et al., 2018, p. 114). It attends to the social construction of ability in schools and how differences are sometimes constructed as disabilities. DSE “shifts our professional gaze from identifying what is ‘wrong’ with individual students to what we have power to change in the instructional environment to facilitate the full participation of each student” (Collins et al., 2018, p. 114). Collins and Ferri (2016) have articulated a cross-pollination of literacy teaching and DSE, where they suggest three habits of mind: (1) start with the position that everyone in the classroom community belongs, and the teacher’s job is to support everyone’s meaningful participation; (2) presume competence, assuming that “each learner has something valuable to contribute and wants to participate” (p. 4); and (3) recognize that struggle is located in interactions between learners and the learning environment. In this issue, we’re interested in explorations of inclusive elementary classrooms. We’re wondering: How is dis/ability constructed in elementary literacy classrooms? How do teachers resist labeling and sorting practices in literacy instruction? How do ability, race, and gender intersect in our classroom practices and pedagogies? How do we strive—and struggle—to cultivate inclusive classrooms that honor differences?
Collins, K., & Ferri, B. (2016). Literacy education and disability studies: Reenvisioning struggling students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60( 1), 7–12. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.552
Collins, K. M., Wagner, M. O., & Meadows, J. (2018). Every story matters: Disability studies in the literacy classroom. Language Arts, 96(2), 114–19.
November 2023: Viewpoints & Visions
No longer accepting submissions
For this unthemed issue, we invite Feature Article and Perspectives on Practice submissions that offer a variety of viewpoints and visions related to language arts across multiple settings and modalities. What topics, concerns, or issues do you think are important to today’s readers of Language Arts? What kinds of theoretical lenses have you applied to your inquiry work to increase our collective understandings of language arts instruction? How does your research illustrate the range of ways in which young people are engaged with the language arts? What trends do you see in the field of language arts? What innovative literacy practices do you see in the diverse spaces of classrooms and community settings? Within a digital age, how are our understandings of children’s literature, writing instruction, and literacy learning shifting? These are just a few of the many questions that can be explored in this issue. Join us in crafting an assortment of articles that helps to expand our viewpoints and visions about language arts.