Cultural and Linguistic Diversity: Call for Manuscripts

In 2020, the Journal of College Reading and Learning will publish its fiftieth volume. Since its inception, the JCRL has published hundreds of articles and reviews helping practitioners and researchers build their capacity to support post-secondary learning. Our field has always supported a diverse student population, and it has only become clearer over the past half century that supporting students means recognizing and supporting diversity of culture, language, and life circumstances. We can think of no better way to celebrate the journal’s golden anniversary than to highlight the multicultural and multilingual nature of our field.

The fiftieth volume will launch JCRL’s expansion to four issues per year—all centered on cultural and linguistic diversity in post-secondary literacy, developmental education, and learning assistance.
See attached document for details and dates.

Special Guest Contributors

Each issue will feature contributions from prominent scholars on language, literacy, and learning, including:

• Dr. Vershawn Ashanti Young, University of Waterloo (featured in issue 50.1)
  Professor, 2020 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and author of Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy

• Dr. Sonya L. Armstrong, Texas State University (featured in issue 50.2)
  Professor and Doctoral Program Director, incoming President-Elect of the College Reading and Learning Association, and co-editor of Teaching Developmental Reading: Practical, Historical, and Theoretical Background Readings

• Dr. Asao B. Inoue, Arizona State University (featured in issue 50.3)
  Professor and the Associate Dean of the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts, 2019 Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and author of Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future

• Dr. Rachele Lawton, Community College of Baltimore County (featured in issue 50.4) Professor and Department Chair for Academic Literacy and Languages and co-author of Meeting the Needs of Linguistically Diverse Students at the College Level

• Dr. Christa de Kleine, Notre Dame of Maryland University (featured in issue 50.4) Professor and TESOL Program Coordinator and co-author of Meeting the Needs of Linguistically Diverse Students at the College Level

Topics of Interest

We invite submissions that critically examine the intersections of cultural and linguistic diversity and our work as post-secondary literacy and learning support professionals. We encourage potential authors to think beyond surface-level interpretations of cultural and linguistic diversity and to interrogate the manifestations of such diversity in both historical and contemporary educational contexts. While we welcome all manuscripts related to the theme, we are particularly interested in submissions that address questions such as the following:

• How do we define linguistic and cultural diversity in higher education?

• In what ways does focusing on the intersectional nature of the language arts, i.e, reading, writing, speaking, listening, and visually representing, in literacy instruction enhance both teaching and learning for diverse populations?

• How do racial, class, and gender identities positively impact diverse students’ acquisition of post-secondary language arts literacies?

• How might current reform movements and policy mandates focused on acceleration toward completion have unintended consequences and unanticipated implications for linguistically and culturally diverse students?

• How do we, as post-secondary literacy, developmental education, and learning assistance professionals, make sense of, critique, and operationalize curricular mandates that we perceive as incompatible with our own social justice values, learner-centered pedagogies, and epistemological assumptions?

• How do we, as post-secondary literacy, developmental education, and learning assistance experts, bring our expertise about diverse learners to decision-making conversations about our field(s), especially when those conversations are driven by those outside our field(s)?

• How do we continue to advocate for students and fight for both access and success in higher education for all learners in the current climate of reform?

• How well do the policies, and practices and pedagogy of higher education value and support linguistic diversity?

• How might attempts to embrace linguistic diversity position speakers of languages other than English and “non-mainstream” varieties of English as “the other” in higher education. What are the consequences of such attempts?

• Do our policies and practices, inside and outside of the classroom, value the resources that multilingual students bring to higher education, or do we view this linguistic diversity within a deficit-oriented framework?

• How do we interrogate and negotiate “mainstream” English’s positioning as the norm in society?

• In what ways do teachers’ own language ideologies disadvantage students whose home languages are not “mainstream” English?

• How well are our pedagogy, policies, and practices informed by students’ voices? To what degree do students’ own language ideologies reflect society’s attitudes toward linguistic diversity?

• What are effective and socially just ways to respond to, assess, evaluate, or grade multilingual and other diverse student writers?

• What ethical or other social justice responsibilities do post-secondary literacy instructors have when designing curricula, pedagogies, or assessments for diverse and multilingual students?

• How should post-secondary literacy courses and pedagogies respond productively and ethically to current anti-immigration policies, the bolder stance that various white supremacist and nationalist groups have been willing to take, and the rise of social movements such as the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, MeToo, among others, given their impact on culturally and linguistically diverse students?