From the Editors

Abstract

Dear Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy Community, We have big news! The International Reading Association (IRA) is now the International Literacy Association (ILA). Volume 58, issue 5 of JAAL reflects the Association's new name and JAAL's redesigned cover, which are more cohesive across the ILA publications that also include The Reading Teacher and Reading Research Quarterly. JAAL will continue to print a cover image on the inside front of each issue, and the front cover now includes a title for the issue that calls attention to big ideas within. Beginning in this issue, we include From the Editors as a brief overview of the issue's contents. We hope this overview will help JAAL users to quickly connect to each issue and that the JAAL community will continue to not only consume content but also interact with it by posting responses to the journal and literacy issues on JAAL's Facebook page. We will continue creating feature article podcasts, and we hope that the From the Editors pieces will assist users’ selection of feature article podcasts to listen to. Over the past year, IRA surveyed members and analyzed the massive amount of Association materials published in the past six decades. Findings from the surveys reaffirmed that the Association is the leading international literacy organization for producing rigorous research and useful resources for literacy practitioners. The Association's journals, books, magazine, online offerings and presence, and conference programs are consistently in strong demand and widely sought after. Over the past 60 years, IRA (now ILA) has partnered with and enriched the professional lives of hundreds of thousands of teachers and, through them, enhanced the literacy learning of millions of students. The new logo and name represent only a small part of the conceptual changes for the new ILA: ILA will focus on the transformative power of literacy with children, adolescent, and adult literacy learners and the institutions that serve them. ILA aims to seek out literacy learners for whom economic and social distress present formidable obstacles, including the 800 million people in today's world who are not yet literate with print-based texts. As ILA works toward advancing its global impact on literacies learning, it will also continue to support teachers, researchers, and teacher educators with resources and journals. We invite the JAAL community to join us in making connections to literacy learners on- and offline and across local, national, and international contexts. The title of this issue, “Love, Landon,” is the same as the title of the inside front cover image, presented by Ann Dinwiddie Madden, a photographer and graphic designer from the Mississippi Gulf Coast of the United States. This image speaks to Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy of the transformative power of literacy. King's love of language transformed the Civil Rights movement in the United States through his long-lasting and impressionable speeches and propelling a movement of nonviolent actions. Throughout this issue runs a critical, social action lens and a focus on the power of language to positively impact literacy learning through action in different contexts. Just as the inside cover art title “Love, Landon” speaks directly to the audience, so do the articles in this issue, calling the JAAL community to take note and act on more equitable and relevant literacy teaching and learning. As we continue to strive for global representation in JAAL, we are pleased to open this issue with the commentary “Critical Literacy and Social Justice” by Barbara Comber. She examines the rise in poverty on a global level; asserts that the work of critical literacy needs to question the connections among poverty, education, and literacy, both within classroom contexts and at the level of policy; and provides concrete strategies to move from rhetoric to social action. Margaret Njeru's piece, “Parents as Participants in Their Children's Learning: A Tall Order for Parents in Rural Kenya,” is the third column this volume year in the Policy and Advocacy department edited by Raul Mora. Njeru's column discusses the challenges involved in supporting Kenyan parents’ participation in school literacy learning. In “Rethinking Gaps: Literacies and Languages in Participatory Cultures,” Korina Jocson and Jonathan Rosa call into question whose language is included/excluded in participatory culture. They assert that teachers and researchers working within a construct of participatory culture must address the language gaps to fully support youths’ literacies in their production of digital texts. Steven Landry's Literacy Lenses piece, “A Port Window View,” uses a nautical metaphor for teachers to reconsider the connections between the teaching of adolescent literature and adolescents’ uses of multiliteracies. In her feature article, “Who's Using the Language? Supporting Middle School Students With Content Area Academic Language,” Dianna Townsend argues that in order for middle school students to learn content area academic language, they must produce it themselves. Next, Michael DeSchryver's “Web-Mediated Knowledge Synthesis for Educators” draws on his work with inservice master's level students enrolled in an online technology course. This article sheds light on how Internet users might use language as a query tool for generating, synthesizing, and repurposing meaning from content on the Web. In “There Is Enough Time: Accounting for Each Student's Learning Trajectory and Identity Needs With Proleptic-Ethnodrama,” Sarah Hobson and Julie Vu delineate how teachers can use ethnodrama to help students revise their understanding of the personal and cultural implications of texts. Rebecca Dierking's “Using Nooks to Hook Reluctant Readers” highlights the promises and challenges of using e-readers to engage, motivate, and improve the reading stamina of grade 10 striving readers in a weekly high school literature class. Last, Kathleen Riley's “Enacting Critical Literacy in English Classrooms: How a Teacher Learning Community Supported Critical Inquiry” describes the case study of a teacher who found support for implementing critical literacy practices within a constrictive school and policy environment through participation in a critical literacy study group. JAAL's final three columns present reviews for adolescents and adults. In the Visual and Digital Text reviews column edited by Stergios Botzakis, Natalia Ward presents “Resources for Supporting Bilingualism and Biliteracy in Adolescents.” Through highlighting and evaluating apps and programs created to assist teachers, students, and others in bilingual education and biliteracy, she shares relevant resources that provide language learners with powerful language and literacy learning opportunities. Jim Blasingame shares three reviews in his Print-Based Text column, including a review of Invasion by the critically acclaimed and late author Walter Dean Myers, who published more than 80 books for children and adolescents and received numerous honors, including five Coretta Scott King Book Awards. In the Professional Resources column edited by Marcelle Haddix, Arianna Howard reviews and uses texts by Howard and Kirkland to call for a renewed and sustained focus on the achievement of black males in “Placing Black Male Youth at Promise.” Finally, Peggy Semingson's Meeting of the Minds features comments from JAAL Facebook users who continue to engage in dialogue online about significant topics of literacies teaching and learning. We hope you will embrace this first JAAL issue of ILA's rebranding and draw on it in your individual and collaborative efforts to facilitate transformative literacies learning opportunities for adolescents and adults.