Language & Literacy Special Issue Call for Proposals--Post-Pandemic Classroom Literacies
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the lives of children and youth, including their access to and participation in classroom learning experiences. In these times, language and literacy education has been resituated across modes of text, interactivity, and enactment in social/familial/educative contexts. As many parts of the world look forward to a returning stability in classroom-based learning, pandemic experiences remain an active part of students’ lives and learning histories.
The multiplicity of pandemic losses, gains, disruptions, and nurturances call for new forms of rich and responsive classroom-based language and literacy learning and a re-imagining of literacy practices and possibilities. However, some educational bodies are exclusively framing the return to school through discourses of lost learning, delayed proficiency, and calls for expedient and wide-spread remediation. Without negating the impact of missed school experiences, the compounding effects of disrupted schooling on socio-economic inequities, and the impact of prolonged uncertainties across multiple aspects of learning and being, we also wish to resist the deficit discourses currently at work. In this special issue, our aim is to inquire into how educators are recognizing the capacious learning that may have occurred as children participated in everyday literacies and forms of expression that may typically be precluded by full-day schooling.
For this special issue of Language & Literacy, we invite scholars working in K-8 (Reception through to Middle School) classroom research contexts or contexts that bridge homecommunity- school learning to share portraits—small-scale inquiries or studies—of postpandemic literacies and literacy learning.
We invite submissions from language and literacy researchers that consider practical and theoretical questions such as:
How are educators navigating the transitions between pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post-pandemic language and literacy learning? What affordances from children’s pandemic experiences are they drawing on? How are school-based practices of language and literacy instruction being re-imagined, so as not to simply return to a pre-pandemic status quo?
How are language and literacy being used to rebuild communities following the disruptions of 2020 and 2021? Within the school? Across contexts? How are educators reclaiming language, literacy, and schools as collective places and spaces for learning, rather than spaces focused solely on individual learners gathered in one room or building?
What are the social and material implications of working with and through literacies in post-pandemic classrooms? How does post-pandemic literacy learning evoke reattunements to material and relational aspects of school experiences? What forms of materiality interpret and propose literate ways of thinking, acting, and relating in post-pandemic learning environments?
Prospective authors are welcome to contact the guest-editors directly (Drs. Ronna Mosher rhmosher@ucalgary.ca and Kim Lenters k.lenters@ucalgary.ca (English) or Dr. Gail Cormier gcormier@ustboniface.ca (French) to informally discuss their proposed contribution or seek feedback on their abstract.
Submission Guidelines:
Articles for this special issue can be submitted in either English or French and will undergo a twostage peer review process.
1. To formally express interest in contributing to the Language & Literacy special issue, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to rhmosher@ucalgary.ca by October 4, 2021. Successful authors will be notified by November 1, 2021.
2. The selected authors will be invited to submit full drafts by June 30, 2022, an extended deadline intended to provide authors the opportunity to think with the premise of this CFP and possibly conduct small-scale case studies or research projects. These full drafts will be peer reviewed prior to final acceptance for the special issue.
The word count for Language & Literacy is 6000-8000 words. Please refer to the journal’s author guidelines as you prepare your submission.
