December Newsletter

As teacher educators, we must maintain a responsibility of not only providing prospective teachers with strong content knowledge, but also with the knowledge and ability to effectively teach Black students. We must move forward as faculty in departments of teacher education by asking ourselves crucial questions regarding our ability to effectively support prospective teachers to develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to teach all students. What role do we play in equipping teachers with the skills and dispositions to address racism in our classrooms? Are the teachers we train and work with committed to and able to critically reflect on their beliefs and actions toward their students especially when their race and ethnicity differ? Do our departments of teacher education include multiple faculty with firm commitments and skills to address educational equity in teacher education? Do we explicitly teach prospective teachers strategies for engaging with students especially during moments of tension that are rooted in care?

To read the rest of this month's Scholars Speak Out article, click here.

During the 2017 – 2018 academic year, the SSO section of JoLLE will feature essays by scholars such as professors, teachers, students, and administrators who are engaging with discussions around social justice issues and racism in education and in modern society. Please click here for more information about this ongoing series.

Pamela Pan’s Integrating Diversity and Cultural Education into Literacy, originally published in 2006, begins with a powerful vignette featuring a heated debate on race had by the students in her writing class. Her students raise the same concerns on racial and cultural issues that are still voiced today, eleven years later. In her piece, Pan explores ways to incorporate diversity into her teaching by using literacy as a means to explore issues similar to those posed in the opening discussion. She shares these steps with the readers of JoLLE.

By first determining a teacher’s integral role in the navigation of multiculturalism in the classroom, Pan presents ways that teachers have handled diversity in the past, ranging from hands-off approaches and lack of attention to the gradual incorporation we see today. Next, recognizing and becoming familiar with students’ different cultural backgrounds is key, as is revising school curriculum to incorporate these cultures. Pan cites that including diverse texts in your classroom library is a way to start this revision of content, and she suggests favorite titles such as House on Mango Street, Black Boy, and Goodbye Vietnam.

These steps are a guide for teachers to begin to integrate diversity into their literacy and writing instruction. This incorporation of multiculturalism into literacy can, in turn, make literacy a path to empowerment. How can we continue to foster transformative discussions on race and culture, like the one featured in Pan’s piece? What are other ways to make the changes needed to empower our students?

To read our Take 2 article for this semester, click here.

We invite you to submit a manuscript to The Journal of Language and Literacy Education’s (JoLLE) themed Spring 2018 issue. The theme of this year’s issue follows our annual conference theme: Reframing Pedagogical Practices and Language and Literacy Research: Teaching to the Future (more information below). Manuscripts are due by February 13, 2018 by 11:59 p.m. EST. Please refer to the JoLLE guidelines for submission, found here.

In her presidential address at the annual American Education Research Association conference, Dr. Vivian Gadsden encouraged educators and researchers to reframe pedagogical practices, seek places of optimism, and find interdisciplinary synergy to strengthen educational ideals. This invitation echoes various scholars who understand the necessity to reimagine and redefine how we research, how we teach, and how we acknowledge and sustain differences in language and literacy. For this year’s conference and themed journal edition, we aim to heed Gadsden’s call by expanding, reimagining, and reshaping the boundaries that may constrain progress. We invite scholars to generate new ideas aimed to push research to new conceptual, empirical, and philosophical heights. We invite innovators and originators to think about ways to create inventive symbiosis. We invite traditionalists and those who enjoy the classics to reinvent current practices and find the inherent synergy that can create renewed vigor for classic approaches. We invite people from all facets of education to think about the ways we can join together to propel ideas about language and literacy into the future.

If you have a manuscript that you think would be a great fit for our spring issue, please email jolle.submissions@gmail.com. For more information, please consult our submission guidelines.