February 2013: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in the English Classroom
February is Black History Month, and we’re interested to hear about how you use culturally relevant pedagogy in your classrooms to address the needs and affirm the resources of your African American students. Made popular by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s, culturally relevant pedagogy recognizes the diverse cultural characteristics of students from different ethnic backgrounds and adjusts teaching methods to account for this diversity. Culturally relevant teachers display cultural competence, or skills at teaching in multicultural settings, often relating curricula to students’ cultural contexts and backgrounds. What does this look like with your students? What literature do you use? How do you define “culture”? How do you learn about your students’ cultural contexts and backgrounds? And how do you connect student culture to English standards and objectives? Deadline: October 15, 2012.
April 2013 ELQ Call for Manuscripts: Staying Human
In his new book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, author Jonathan Gottschall suggests that stories help us navigate complex social problems and bind people together. He also says that people who read fiction are more empathetic than those who don’t. In George Orwell’s 1984, when Winston fears he is losing his mind and longs to “stay human,” he begins writing a journal. With the growing focus on STEM education and the use of nonfiction and expository texts in the English classroom, we want to hear how you’re keeping the humanities alive in your classroom. What poems and works of fiction will you continue to teach, regardless of curricular and/or testing expectations? Why and how do you incorporate arts and visual literacy in your curriculum? How do you incorporate storytelling, journaling, and narrative writing in your instruction? How do you preserve the freedom for students to read genres of choice? Tell us how you’re keeping the humanities spirit alive in your classroom or school!
Deadline: December 15, 2012.
August 2013 ELQ Call for Manuscripts: What Did You Read This Summer?
For this issue, Guest Editor Joellen Maples, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, would like to know what’s on your recommended summer reading list for students. What factors inform your decisions about what books make the list? Do you use young adult literature? If so, how do you decide what books to recommend? Do you use student surveys, read reviews, or follow trends? How, if at all, have the Common Core Standards influenced your recommendations? What supplemental activities do you assign with your summer reading list? What will you and your students do with the summer reading once school starts? We want to know what you and your students read this summer and why! Send manuscripts to firstname.lastname@example.org.
Deadline: April 15, 2013.