In This Issue 78:1

Our first issue has, among multiple intersecting themes, a focus on centering the voices of students in their literacy learning experiences, particularly through writing. As a community of scholars, our editorial team shares a passion for writing and its development. We view our work as a diverse and international team of editors as an act of composition: of gathering, organizing, refining, and sharing the work and understandings of colleagues whose writing comes to us from a range of settings and circumstances. We understand this opportunity to write alongside authors and to our Reading Teacher audience, as a way to connect the lives and learning of teachers and students across the globe. And, a way to generate and inspire the teaching, learning, and inquiry that drive emerging understandings about literacy education as an expansive field of meaning-making.

When writing is foregrounded in literacy education, the integral connections between reading and writing facilitate growth in each. When student voices are foregrounded in teaching and in research, we all have the opportunity to broaden our understandings and perspectives. We are committed to an expansive, inclusive approach that stands against significant trends toward narrowing the measure, definition, instruction, and experience of literacy learning in school settings. This issue includes seeds for that resistance.

As we aim to demonstrate in the issues and volumes to come, we bring a set of shared intentions and commitments. These include a shared focus on social, cultural, and linguistic justice. And, it includes a shared focus on the education of students who have been historically minoritized and underserved globally. To create the conditions for this focus, we aim to invite and engage the multilingual, multinational, multimodal literacies of our ever-changing world. This means demonstrating and inviting more globally relevant perspectives, methodologies, topics, and identities into the composition that is The Reading Teacher. We embrace the possibilities of this online space to reconsider the presentation and engagement of literacies within and beyond our traditional article formats. We demonstrate the beginnings of this with our editor team biographies, which we have conceptualized as a collage series (or, what we term ‘multimodal self-portraits’), and with these issue introductions composed as album liner notes.