I (Erin) was in casual conversation recently with an acquaintance who asked me about work. She remembered a book project I told her about a few months ago and wondered if I had finished it. I told her that the book, one Sam and I worked on related to antiracist pedagogy with elementary school students (here is the title as our shameless plug: Storytelling and improvization as anti-racist pedagogies: Challenging white supremacy in elementary education), would be out in a few months.
“That’s a BIG deal!” she said.
Sadly, I had forgotten that it was.
In the race that is academia, I often gloss over that the writing academics share with the world is a big deal. Sometimes I fall into the trap of reducing my work as another measure of a mundane accomplishment, a rung on a ladder to … where? (I still do not know, and I am in my 11th year as an academic.) It is not that I do not care deeply about my work. I do. It is just that it seems before there is time to be still with one creation, the deadline for the next is pressing.
Yet, the ideas of academics, carefully sculpted through our language, are our sacred practice. They should be honored, elevated, and lovingly (and professionally) critiqued. The ideas captured through language in the articles in this journal are the sacred practice of the humans who created them. They should be celebrated.
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My mom (Erin’s) wanted to be a published writer. She never would have told anyone that. She was not confident enough in her dream to hold herself accountable for making it come true. But she kept scores of journals with rough ideas for novels. She scribbled down her favorite books, her favorite authors, and her favorite lines in these journals as inspiration. In her journals, she also kept detailed portraits of her high school English students including specific ideas for what they needed to improve upon and how she might push them. She kept anecdotes about our family life too—beautiful, ordinary moments like when she worried about my high fever once when I was eight to the moments that ruptured the stability of our lives, moments we never openly talked about because we were a family who processed pain internally. In every new journal she began in January, she wrote that she would write more that year, she would finish a novel that year, or at least publish an essay that year. She never did.
Over the recent holidays, I spent time with my large, boisterous family. We went through my mom’s things. Things my dad does not know what to do with. I have been dubbed “the family writer” so my dad gave me her journals. I know he does not want to read them. I did what he did not want to over the next few days: I organized her journals chronologically from 1983 to 2016, and I began to read them. I have not finished because there are times I do not want to read the things she could not speak about openly. Yet, I will continue because her words should be honored with my attention. They are a gift. While my mom was not a published writer in the way she wanted to be, writing in her journals was her sacred practice.
Cole Author Riley, a writer and the creator of Black Liturgies, wrote the best book I read in 2023: This here flesh. In it, she reflected on the intergenerational wisdom passed to her from her grandmother. When her grandmother died in 2021, she said about her: “She was, in so many ways, the beginning of me. A writer who longed to be recognized and in the end was by her family, by God, and by self.”
I think all of us who write for a living owe a debt to someone who is or was “the beginning of [us].” And, that is why I want to change the way I approach reading and writing in 2024. I want to remember that published writing is a gift, that it is a big deal. While we may take it for granted as academics because it is a necessary part of our jobs, somewhere in all of us there was, there is, a beginning. A beginning that imparted the wisdom we try to make sense of through our writing, a beginning whose dreams of recognition may not have been actualized for themselves.
In this volume, we honor the wisdom of these authors and their sacred practice. We also honor the unnamed, unpublished ancestors who are their beginnings. Published writing is an intergenerational gift of sharing wisdom. It is a big deal.
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In this issue, Borim Song and Kyungeun Lim use storytelling to explore how undergraduate students experienced the transition to online education after the outbreak of COVID-19. Themes of loneliness were reported, as well as multilayered innovations to find connection through online learning. Their article is entitled, “Isolation, connection, and embracement: Exploring students’ perspectives on virtual art education during the pandemic.”
In “The difficult search for belonging for Canadian-born Ismaili Muslim adolescents in Toronto, Canada,” Farah Virani-Murji explores the narratives of feeling excluded and misunderstood as articulated by Canadian-born Shia Ismaili Muslim youth. This analysis examines dynamics such as discomfort, difference, and anxiety as youth seek to find a place of belonging in Canada.
Rachel Horst and Derek Gladwin’s article, “Multiple futures literacy: An interdisciplinary review” synthesizes research that investigates the ways humans engage with future potentiality. They suggest moving toward an expansive model of futures literacies and mapping generative connections between literacy research and other discourses including futures studies scholarship.
“Mourning The Chrysalids: Currere, affect, and letting go” is an article by Adrian M. Downey that revisits the novel The Chrysalids toward a reconsideration of the novel’s place within curriculum and the pedagogies it may offer. Downey expresses the need for a (re)visioning of what curricular fixtures such as The Chrysalids could mean today.
Bryan Smith’s “Walking the stories of colonial ghosts: A method of/against the geographically mundane” theorizes how the street naming practices of settler communities write into everyday life a settler collective memory that shapes space into (settler) place and powerfully intervenes in individual (student) geographic consciousness
“Anne and Emmett: University education students’ reactions to a course in countering racism and antisemitism in the classroom” by Meir Muller shares a study that analyzed the reactions of undergraduate and graduate education students in a course that used the lives of Anne Frank and Emmett Till to learn pedagogies designed to counter racism and antisemitism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).