Upcoming Themes
May 2010: Locating Standards in Language Arts Education
Many professional organizations across content areas have established standards for teaching and learning (i.e., NCTE & IRA, NCTM, NCSS), providing the framework for state and local curriculum development. In this issue, we are interested in exploring the impact standards-based education has on preK–8 literacy education. How do you relate ideas, contents, and reflections with standards? What curricular absences and possibilities should we be exploring? Who is the assumed audience for these standards, and how do the standards benefit or constrain teaching and learning in diverse settings? What are the tensions between skills and knowledge? How do these tensions serve teachers’ and children’s agency in knowledge production? How do we respond to standards in education based on our political and ethical obligations to our students? We invite submissions addressing these questions and other issues related to English language arts standards. (Submission deadline: January 15, 2009)
July 2010: Inquiries and Insights
In this unthemed issue, we feature your current questions and transformations as educators, community members, students, and researchers. Many directions are possible in this issue. What tensions do you see in literacy education today? What do readers of Language Arts need to notice and think about? What inquiry work have you done that can stretch the field of literacy and language arts? Describe your process of learning about literature, literacy, culture, social justice, and language. What new literacy practices do you see in communities, after-school programs, and classrooms? What supports these practices? What is getting in the way of change? What connections are adults and children making as they engage in the art of language? Join us in creating a collection of inquiries and insights. (Submissions deadline: March 15, 2009)
September 2010: Language Arts in a 2.0 World
What brings communities of teachers, children, languages, images, and ideas together? As teachers and researchers, we are likely to think first of the classroom as a place for such intersections, but we all know that the Web and wireless technologies have
become more available to youth and communities—and they are using these resources to forge social networks, participate in interest groups and gaming communities, and “talk back” to the local and national events in their lives. The descriptor “2.0” refers to the revolutionary tools that have reshaped the Web’s uses from accessing information to shaping groups, identities, and meanings. In this issue, we invite stories and studies of the places you have made or observed for bringing powerful words, images, and ideas together. Whether the connections are online or off-line, what makes these new connections revolutionary? What is surprising and (should we say it?) fun about community building and meaning making? Why? Whose lives and learning have been renewed or changed? (Submission deadline: May 15, 2009)
Feature Call
In each issue, we will feature a final page called “In Closing . . . .” This is a one-page format (750-word maximum) that could take the form of a poem, essay, conversation, journal entry, short story, or visual art with caption. The focus is on the voices of educators who have recognized a shift in perspective, perception, or practice—in their school, their district, or themselves. We hope that readers will look forward to this feature because it prompts them to remember and rethink. Deadline is ongoing.