Submission deadline: January 15, 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.

Submission deadline: June 15, 2024

In our first issue as new editors (September 2021), we focused on the theme of Antiracist Pedagogies. We returned to this theme at the midpoint of our editorship (September 2023), with a focus on Centering Blackness in Pedagogy and Practice. Now, in the first issue of our final volume as editors (September 2025), we are interested in exploring Abolitionist Pedagogies. Rooted in Black critical theory, abolitionist pedagogy focuses on restoring humanity and pursuing educational freedom for all children in schools (Love, 2019). Inspired by the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists, abolitionist teaching cultivates an educational system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving (Love, 2019). Some questions to consider include: How can language arts educators share the constant struggle for freedom with students while building camaraderie? How can issues of social justice be embedded in language arts instruction with children and with preservice teachers to help celebrate Black joy? How might language arts educators design classroom learning environments that are humanizing for all students? Join us in continuing this important conversation about antiracist pedagogies by expanding our understanding of language arts teaching that restores and uplifts humanity and pursues educational freedom for all children in schools.

Submission deadline: August 15, 2024

Renee Watson’s “Love Is a Revolution” follows a teenage girl’s quest for self-acceptance and love while challenging societal beauty standards and addressing issues of fat phobia. In the book, the repetition of the mantra “self-love is radical love” underscores the radical nature of self-acceptance, suggesting that embracing and loving oneself, especially in the face of societal pressures, is a revolutionary act. Just as with literature, the human body is a textual artifact subjected to interpretation, reading, and judgment. This resonates deeply with the need for change in how educational settings address fat phobia. Children’s and young adult literature are powerful tools for shaping young minds, cultivating empathy, and challenging societal norms. To further this dialogue and address the pervasive issue of fat phobia within educational spaces, we invite scholars, educators, authors, parents, students, and researchers to contribute to an upcoming special issue. How can ELA classrooms initiate a shift towards love and affirmation for the fat body, recognizing its importance in fostering self-esteem and dismantling harmful stereotypes? Similarly, how can English/language arts classrooms transform into sanctuary spaces for fat individuals navigating the complex intersections of race, gender, sexualities, abilities, languages, and religions? For this issue, we seek perspectives that acknowledge a collective responsibility in addressing, resisting, and dismantling fat phobia. 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.

Submission deadline: October 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? How are language arts teachers and researchers responding to contemporary societal issues and their influence on educational spaces? What kinds of theoretical lenses have you applied to your inquiry work to increase our collective understandings of language arts instruction; furthermore, how are these inquiries informing and expanding theoretical frameworks? How are children’s multiple languages and cultures being sustained across learning spaces, including classrooms, homes, and community settings? How are educators, researchers, families, and children working together to enact critical pedagogies that are humanizing and transformative? 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 children and the language arts.

Submission deadline: January 5, 2025

Play is central to how children learn—the way they form and explore friendships, the way they shape and test hypotheses, and the way they make sense of their world. Play has been shown to build the brain and the body, support brain structure and functioning, facilitating synapse connection and improving brain plasticity. Play is also critical to establishing safe, stable, and nurturing relationships, supporting developmental milestones, and mental health. Depending on the culture to which children grow up, they learn different skills through play. Although powerful connections between play and literacy have long been documented, testing and accountability contexts often push play to the periphery in classrooms. For this issue, we invite Feature Articles and Perspectives on Practice submissions that explore the intersection of play and the language arts. Questions to consider include: How do children engage in playful, intertextual practices as they read and write in school? Why does dramatic and imaginative play matter in language arts instruction? How do teachers support purposeful play in classrooms, and how do they resist the marginalization of play in schools? How might the ways children play reveal aspects of their identities and cultures? Join us in creating an issue that explores the importance of play in children’s lives and literacy learning.

Submission deadline: February 15, 2025

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? How are language arts teachers and researchers responding to contemporary societal issues and their influence on educational spaces? What kinds of theoretical lenses have you applied to your inquiry work to increase our collective understandings of language arts instruction; furthermore, how are these inquiries informing and expanding theoretical frameworks? How are children’s multiple languages and cultures being sustained across learning spaces, including classrooms, homes, and community settings? How are educators, researchers, families, and children working together to enact critical pedagogies that are humanizing and transformative? 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 children and the language arts.

Submission deadline: April 15, 2025

As our tenure as editors draws to a close, we want to revisit the sentiments that informed our initial decision to pursue this editorship. Initially, we envisioned our role as activists, working to uplift visions of literacy that contributed to more transformative ends. Specifically, we sought to: (1) amplify participatory research frameworks that honor diverse ways of knowing; (2) contribute to the development of pedagogical approaches that honor and sustain the languages, cultures, and identities of students, and (3) position children as full human beings who are agents of change. As we look back, we can’t help but wonder what the imagined but not yet realized future of language arts looks like for K–8 learners and educators. Some questions we hope to consider for our final issue include: What do collaboration and solidarity look like in ELA classrooms so that students are positioned to lay claim to their infinite potential? What kinds of futures should we be collectively striving toward? How are our pedagogies embracing metaphors of contribution and daring? What does it truly look like when students are positioned in agentive ways to be activists in their educational futures? We recognize that to remember is to invent and we invite you to be inventors with us and imagine ways forward as it relates to literacy and the language arts for children in grades K–8.

January 2025: Expanding Possibilities through Arts-Based Pedagogies and Methods

Special topic issue edited by Rebecca Woodard and Haeny Yoon

No longer accepting submissions.

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.

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.