Talking Points

Submission Guidelines

Talking Points is a peer-reviewed journal published in May and October by LLA, Literacies and Languages for All, a conference of NCTE. The journal focuses on holistic education that fits the LLA belief that ALL children deserve personally meaningful learning contexts in which their languages and cultures are valued and recognized as assets for learning.

Submitted manuscripts should be on a teaching and/or learning topic or issue important to researcher, practitioner, social, and family communities. We welcome manuscripts grounded in present theory and/or research that contributes to the knowledge base for holistic, democratic, and inclusive education. Manuscripts should:

be no more than 15 pages in length (standard margins, double spaced);
contain page numbers;
follow the latest APA guidelines;
be consistent with NCTE’s Statement on Gender and Language.

In addition, to ensure a blinded manuscript, do not include a cover sheet but instead provide author information in the Comments box in Editorial Manager during the manuscript submission process.

To submit a manuscript, register as an author at our online manuscript submission system, Editorial Manager, and then follow the steps to submit your article. Manuscripts are accepted at any time.

Questions? Contact editors Patricia C. Paugh and Sherry Sanden at talkingpoints@ncte.org.

October 2024: Addressing Censorship in the Schools
Submission deadline: May 1, 2024

Talking Points seeks manuscripts on a range of whole language teaching and learning topics. For the October 2024 issue, we invite submissions that address research and practice reflecting on school censorship efforts and the goals and mission of the Literacies and Languages for All (LLA) conference.

Here is one of the LLA guiding beliefs:

Whole language educators create welcoming spaces for all learners.

This is a specific call for manuscripts regarding the inherent problem of censorship in our schools, which interferes with opportunities for teachers to continue to offer their classrooms as welcoming spaces for all learners.

Some examples of timely topics include the following: How can teachers be supported and empowered when experiencing personal attacks? How can the educational community work to prepare teachers for potential attacks? How can teachers be prepared to persevere when there is so much fear and turmoil in the field? What can be done to aid teachers in continuing to elevate the voices of students that censorship attempts to erase?

Here are some links to recent NCTE resources that support these ideas and may be helpful to authors:

Classroom Voices (ongoing feature)
Submission deadline: October 1 for the May issue; March 1 for the October issue

In each issue of Talking Points, the Classroom Voices section provides space for shorter alternative pieces that highlight the richness of whole language in the classroom. We invite classroom vignettes, photo essays, book reviews, samples of students’ work, teacher interviews, or anything else that helps us situate the principles of whole language in real classroom contexts. These pieces should be no longer than 1–2 double-spaced pages of text; accompanying photos should be submitted in a standard graphics format (tiff, jpeg, etc.) in high resolution (300 DPI) and will require signed permissions from the photographer and the subjects. Student work will also require permission to be included.

Note: For all pieces, please rely on the Whole Language Beliefs (http://www2.ncte.org/groups/wlu/beliefs/) to demonstrate how your work draws on and contributes to whole language principles and teaching practices.