In this article, Sun Young Lee presents a critical analysis of global whiteness, explicating how citational practices rooted in white-centric perspectives perpetuate epistemic coloniality in education reforms. Drawing on critical transpacific studies and critical whiteness studies, this study problematizes US educational imperialism for reinforcing global whiteness through universalized configuration of educational theories. To challenge its continuity, Lee first historicizes the paradoxical outcomes of postcolonial education reforms in South Korea, which aimed to counter Japanese imperialism but inadvertently reimperialized the systems of educational knowledge with US-centric epistemes. Lee then specifies how citational practices on US-centric progressivism, including John Dewey's theories, have shaped the epistemic possibilities for new education initiatives in South Korea. Pointing out the white-centric racialized origins in progressive ideas, Lee engages in historicizing as a critical methodology to reevaluate the humanitarian ideals of national education as embodying globally mobilized white-centric norms. The article concludes by calling for transpacific studies in education research, emphasizing both deconstruction and reconstruction of epistemic possibilities through reimagined global interconnectivity and nonlinear temporality toward equitable futures of educational change.

In this essay, Brady L. Nash and Allison Skerrett reexamine the New London Group's theory of multiliteracies thirty years after its initial conception, considering how changes in technology, culture, and politics have impacted the ability of young people to act as designers of social futures. Multiliteracies theory led to an explosion of scholarship examining how students use multiple literacies to design and communicate meanings within an interconnected world. Today, artificial intelligence and complex algorithms govern digital communication, people communicate and move across a global expanse at an unparalleled clip, and right-wing authoritarian movements, often aligned with wealthy financiers that control communications technologies exploit racial constructs to accrue power. By looking at the ways algorithms and digital platforms govern information and communication, the role of affect and emotion in communication and meaning making, the complex literacies of transnational youth, and the racialized power relationships inherent in linguistic communication, this essay explores how the concept of design, central to the multiliteracies framework, is inherently related to assumptions about rationality and agency in a world in which digital technologies, human emotions, national boundaries, and racial dynamics influence and constrain the ability of humans to act as designers of social futures.

In this essay, Catherine Park and Glynda A. Hull take an analytical deep dive into a student artifact produced in an undergraduate education course they teach to trace how diverse young people navigate their multiple identities and cultures relationally and are constantly in processes of negotiating these relations. Through this analysis they interrogate notions of culture in asset-based pedagogies that may reinforce static and reductive understandings of cultures in practice and instead adopt transculturality to denote that cultures have always been colored by moments of contact. Park and Hull trace the contact zones students create between their myriad cultural communities and reflect on a pedagogy of transculturality designed to enable students to practice deep and meaningful engagements with the plural cultures that constitute their identities.

In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment.

In this essay, justice-oriented educators Lauren B. Cattaneo and Wendi N. Manuel-Scott take up Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1967 call to academics to join the ranks of the “creatively maladjusted,” recognizing that education is a perennial site of struggle, particularly in times of social upheaval. In detailing King's call for maladjustment as an ongoing commitment to resisting conformity to societal structures that perpetuate inequity and to the practices and paradigms in disciplines that reify and rationalize those structures, they expand the idea of creativity through the work of writers who have provided insights on imagination, radical hope, and the cooptation of creativity that can block transformational change. To elaborate the idea implicit in King's writing that nurturing generative collectives is at the heart of creative maladjustment, they provide several examples of creatively maladjusted educators past and present who they find particularly inspiring. The authors conclude with a call to hold both the precarity and hope that creative maladjustment invites, answering King's urging that we stick with the struggle of pursuing justice in the face of uncertainty.