A Note from the Editorial Team

In 2020, as the Journal of College Reading and Learning (JCRL) celebrated its 50^th volume, the editors decided to dedicate not just one issue, but the entire volume to the theme of Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Postsecondary Literacy and Learning. This decision was made based on viewing the theme as more than an important focus for a collection of articles, but as a direction in which the conversations of our field urgently needed to go. The volume ultimately included four guest contributions and twelve additional pieces covering a range of topics that interrogate how developmental and literacy educators engage the richness of linguistic and cultural diversity that students bring to their college experiences.

The two years since the completion of Volume 50 have seen ongoing momentum in this work. While we expect topics related to linguistic and cultural diversity to continue populating the pages of JCRL well into the future, we wanted to set aside this issue for deliberate revisitation of this theme. Accordingly, we invited submissions that responded to any of the pieces in Volume 50 or otherwise engaged with the theme.

We open this issue with a non-traditional piece for JCRL, Alison Douglas’s narrative essay “Seeing Shakira: Critical Reflections on the Unspoken Rules of Whiteness.” We hope this piece will serve as an invitation to readers to ask themselves what barriers stand in the way of truly seeing each individual in their educational/professional spaces.

In her guest contribution in Volume 50, Sonya Armstrong, then President-Elect of the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA), reflected on the identity of and broad challenges facing the Dev Ed’r Field. In this issue’s article “Miles to Go Before We Sleep: A Two-Part Content Analysis of Representations of Equity in the Dev Ed’r Discourse Community,” Emily Suh engages with one of Armstrong’s (2020) primary concerns, the meaning of equity in Dev Ed. Through critical discourse analysis, Suh identifies a need for more serious engagement with equity scholarship in Dev Ed work, echoing Armstrong’s (2020) call to “engage with the research needed to move the … field forward” (p. 66).

Grue (2020) in Volume 50 discussed the use of Afrofuturism texts in undergraduate courses as a way of bringing new perspectives about race and gender to the classroom. In this issue, in “The Impact of Analyzing Young Adult Literature for Racial Identity/Social Justice Orientation with Interdisciplinary Students,” Rachelle S. Savitz, Leslie Roberts, and Daniel Stockwell introduce another approach to introducing new perspectives through texts, examining the importance of diverse books and analysis in secondary and post-secondary classroom settings. Using a holistic qualitative case study approach, the authors explore the impact of young adult literature on self-identity and implicit biases among student participants.

Two articles in this issue respond to Asou Inoue’s guest contribution to Volume 50, “Teaching Antiracist Reading.” Inoue (2020) presented an approach to reading practice that asks readers to slow down and reflect upon the way the reader interacts with the text, pointing out the ways that White language supremacy predisposes readers to particular understandings. In “Antiracist Reading in English Language Arts Classrooms: A Disciplinary Literacy Response to Inoue (2020),” Todd Reynolds, Jodi Lampi, Jodi Holschuh, and Leslie Rush discuss how this approach could be put into action in an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom, and in doing so, connect antiracist reading with existing scholarship on reading in ELA.

Reynolds and colleagues thus preemptively answer the call made by James Dyer and Emily Suh in “(Re)Centering Antiracist Reading in Reading Scholarship: Reading Strategy Applications for Antiracist Reading Praxis” to center reading scholarship in antiracist reading efforts. Dyer and Suh explicitly connect Inoue’s (2020) concept of antiracist reading with reading and literacy scholarship. They then use this background to describe their application of antiracist reading practices in developmental literacy classes.

The final article in this issue is “We can do this in our classes, but what about students in other classes and out in the world?”: How Educators Imagine Code-Meshers and their Audiences,” by Victoria Ogunniyi and Kim O’Neil. In an invited piece in JCRL volume 50, Vershawn Ashanti Young (2020) explained his use of the term “code-meshing” and his admonition against asking students—especially Black students—to suppress their culture and language in the classroom, instead encouraging readers to view language as “a tool in the kit that’s always available to be used in any rhetorical practice as the rhetor-writer-speaker chooses” (p. 16). Pursuing a question that many literacy educators may have asked themselves, Ogunniyi and O’Neil investigate how intentionally code-meshed Black English is perceived by educators of various backgrounds. Their findings provide food for thought and action, particularly for those who support the idea of code-meshing but worry about the effect it will have on audiences.

We are grateful to our authors for answering the call to continue the sometimes-difficult conversation about how our field relates to the diversity of our students’ languages and cultures. Suh, in this issue, reminds of us of the importance of deeply engaging, not only with each other, but also with other postsecondary practitioners and scholars. This engagement must continue, to ensure that the professionals of our field have voice and leadership in creating effective and just learning spaces for our students.