Special Issues

Edited by Tom Liam Lynch, this collection of essays drawn from NCTE's many journals provides an excellent starting point for teachers who want to bring critical media literacy into their K-12 and college classrooms. Critical media literacy is not a single star burning brightly in the night sky. It is more like a constellation, a collection of stars that tell a story about how educators engage with young people through an array of communicative modes in the spirit of inquiry, society, and action. About the Special Issue series: Most teachers and students across the country are grappling with several important issues. We hear from many educators who are looking for compelling and engaging approaches racial literacy, critical media literacy, and trauma-informed teaching. NCTE is responding to these needs with Special Issues, a series of books designed to directly address these pressing topics in K-12 and college classrooms today. The first volumes collect content on these topics from across all of NCTE's journals in one place, to make the most relevant material accessible and practical. Edited by expert practitioners in the field, each volume contains teaching tips to help implement these approaches in classrooms.

Edited by Detra Price-Dennis, this first volume of Special Issues: Racial Literacy gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals, addressing the importance of racial literacy and its implications for curriculum, pedagogy, and policy. There's a great deal of uncertainty, discord, and increased volatility across a number of critical institutions in our society. Each day on social media and TV news outlets we read, listen to, and/or watch events unfold that are linked to political, economic, health, legal, and educational inequities that can be traced to racist ideologies and practices. Public schools across the country are being subjected to pending state legislation and new laws that seek to limit how race, among other markers of identity, can be taught in K—12 classrooms. Editor Detra Price-Dennis has curated this collection to show how teaching from a racial literacy perspective is in conversation with antiracist, culturally responsive, equity-oriented frameworks that uplift curriculum design and instructional strategies. These articles can help educators (re)imagine the classroom as a space that supports the development of racial literacy skills and practices with their students.

This first volume of “Special Issues: Trauma-Informed Teaching” gathers some of the most compelling and practical recent articles across NCTE journals, addressing the importance of trauma-informed teaching and its recent developments in the field. We live in a time that requires attention to trauma. Educators and students are learning how to move forward in this precarious time, which in many ways has amplified preexisting health, racial, economic, and educational inequalities. The pandemic has shaped us in ways we have yet to understand fully, but we know we must adapt and heal together. It is imperative that K-College educators not only consider trauma-informed teaching, but also healing-centered teaching practices. As we think through ways to support the most harmed people in our teaching and learning communities, we will move closer to a more equitable and just healing-centered profession. Editor Sakeena Everett has curated this collection to show how to help K-College teachers integrate the most up-to-date approaches to trauma-informed teaching into their classroom environments. In this volume, you will find valuable insights, diverse perspectives, innovative and exciting pedagogies, as well as thought-provoking research methodologies that engage micro- and macro-level supports you need to get started today.

Teachers and students alike begin their day as humans, and they must all end their day as humans. Experiences of pain, sorrow, loss, fear, disruption, and systemic and institutional oppression are an inevitable presence in schools and classrooms. Editors Elizabeth Dutro and Bre Pacheco have edited this collection of original essays with the belief that trauma-informed teaching, with all of the complex layers that term contains, can and must be harnessed to propel movements toward equity and justice in English language arts classrooms. Woven throughout, authors in this volume share stories from life and literature that aptly show the power and possibility of ELA classrooms for enacting the deepest hopes that fuel the year-to-year, day-to-day, moment-to-moment enactment of humanizing, healing teaching.

This volume questions what constitutes literacy in a society organized by race as an inquiry, to deepen the significance for why K—20 learners must develop knowledges that support their abilities to process and ultimately transform racism. With this collection of original essays, editor Ayanna F. Brown helps to push the field of racial literacy into new directions, to avoid niceties and other pitfalls, to get to the heart of racial understanding, to better respond to the needs of our students and society. This volume brings forth emerging scholars who seek to respond to the sociopolitical and sociohistorical aspects of racial literacy as it relates to youth. The scholarship grapples with how educators at every level think through racial literacy in their work and within their experiences. Each contribution adds depth to the question of agency and illuminates why racial literacy work extends social justice efforts to become a call for a culture of teaching and learning that recenters liberation as an active pursuit.

During a time of increased book banning and censoring, of scrutiny of the word critical, and even calls for surveillance of K—12 teachers, the burgeoning field of critical media literacy is more important than ever. These new challenges demonstrate the importance of teaching media literacy to address some of the most pressing needs of our youth. This second volume devoted to critical media literacy picks up where the first volume left off, as it continues the work of defining this important area of focus and looks for practical and innovative ways to bring these important topics into ELA classrooms. Editors William Kist and Mary T. Christel have curated and edited a wide range of original essays by leading educators in the field, focusing on pedagogical directions of critical media literacy, integrating it into reading, writing, and interdisciplinary instruction, and new ways of teaching about and with media.