July Newsletter

Conferences are opportunities for students, scholars, and teachers to join together to become aware of the challenges in Pre-K-16 education, radically imagine alternatives, and celebrate what works in particular spaces or relationships. But educators cannot stop with celebration. Justice work builds on the theories and successes of the past to push boundaries and reshape what is possible for the present and future. A critical part of moving forward is doing the difficult, engaging, and generative work alongside students and community members.

At the JoLLE@UGA 2020 Winter Conference, we invite teachers, researchers, and students to create and share different pathways for justice in an unjust world through language and literacy education. We welcome proposals that explore what has been, what is now, and what is next as they describe how to do this important work in diverse contexts and education systems. The JoLLE conference is designed to make space for collaborating, planning, and sharing between attendees and presenters, thus creating an imperative for highly interactive sessions.

We look forward to learning with you in Athens from January 31st to February 2nd, 2020 to discuss and explore justice in language and literacy education. Together, presenters and audience members can inquire into what invigorates and revisions the trajectory of education.

Dr. Cole’s (2009) Mapping a rhizomatic ecology of readingis now a decade old. And yet her advocacy to more meaningfully reckon with the “unpredictable and seemingly tangential” energies that readers, texts, and readings produce as they encounter one another--those which “educators might find undesirable and difficult to control” (p. 32)--is every bit as pertinent now as it was then. In our heightened era of standardization alongside recent efforts to commodify learning in privatized settings, Dr. Cole’s emphasis on the descriptive, rather than the prescriptive, elements of readerly experience serves as a refreshing testament to how and why the act of reading becomes so meaningful in the first place. Recognition of these messy, sometimes cathartic, often beautiful, forever unaccountable traces that affect us, take us up, and fundamentally alter our being and becoming in the world is something we should embrace as educators, Dr. Cole argues, not run from.

Describing her own, often deeply personal, encounters with the novel The Mermaid Chair during a graduate reading club, Dr. Cole models for readers the potential of engaging the reading experience in a rhizomatic way--that is, as an act of fluid “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots…[one] that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21). Such possibilities, she asserts, create ...

To read more from our Take 2, click here.

Wisnu Agung Pradana (Wisnu) is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Language and Literacy Education, the University of Georgia (UGA). He earned his bachelor’s degree from Sanata Dharma University, Indonesia, and his master’s degree in TESOL and World Language Education from UGA. Wisnu is currently the editor for Children’s and Young Adult Literature at JoLLE. Prior to his graduate study, he had worked for government agencies and higher learning institutes in Indonesia, Australia, and Vietnam as a language teacher and program developer for English and Indonesian language and culture course. His research interests include Language Socialization, Language and Globalization, and Eye-tracking technology. Recently, he has been working with Dr. Bhattacharya at UGA in investigating the literacy socialization of individuals with Rett Syndrome, a rare X-linked neurodevelopmental disorder resulting from the MeCP2 gene mutation.

For more information about our editorial board, please click here.

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