Volume XI, Issue 1
Introduction and Editors’ Note

This issue of WOW Stories: Connections from the Classroom presents a collection of articles that explore a diverse array of community literacy practices. Teacher educators from different communities share narratives that highlight the significance of space within school district professional development, heritage language schools, school-based heritage celebrations, teen reading ambassadors, and home literacy contexts. Throughout these articles, the concept of space, as theorized by Henri Lefebvre (1991), emerges as a central theme. Lefebvre views space as a social product, shaped by a three-part dialectic involving everyday practices and perceptions, representations, and the spatial imaginary of time. The physical space is shaped by a myriad of actors, including developers, architects, and state entities. Representations of space encompass discourses about social spaces, which can exist independently of their physical presence. Conversely, representational space embodies the lived experiences of individuals who interact with the space, reflecting the unique social dynamics of each environment.

The first vignette examines a year-long study conducted in a community-based book club at a southeast U.S. Chinese Heritage Language school. Wenyu Guo provides insights into using children’s literature to teach racialized history and facilitate race conversations, offering a selected list of picturebooks and resources focused on Chinese American stories. The second vignette explores a home-based literacy community created by Eun Hye Son and Yuwen Chen, emphasizing early literacy-friendly picturebooks that promote inclusivity and social-emotional learning among children, especially in the post-COVID-19 era.

The third article delves into a community-based Korean-English bilingual church space, where family literacy practices utilize culturally relevant picturebooks to foster young heritage language learners’ cultural knowledge and experiences. Jongsun Wee and Denise Dávila illustrate how Korean American children display their transcultural knowledge and experiences when they are invited into a culturally and linguistically diverse space where young language learners and their families engage in a journey to affirm being Korean. This church space serves as a representational space in which diverse Korean people interact with each other. Koreanness is rearticulated by young language learners and mixed ethnic caregivers who widen Korean diversities.

The fourth article discusses classroom teacher-driven inquiry on censorship, underscoring the importance of authentic professional development (PD) that meets teachers’ needs and fosters student-centered learning environments. Junko Sakoi, as a PD developer in her school district, demonstrates the importance of creating a safe space for teachers’ growth and learning, which extends to their teaching in classrooms and students’ learning around censorship and challenged books. When teachers experience teacher-driven PD, they are able to create a learning space that is student-driven and student-oriented inquiry in their classrooms. The article also shows how Yoo Kyung Sung’s involvement from a local university provided a space for a college student to engage with the learning. Creating a safe space where teachers’ voices are recognized in an authentic PD that meets teachers’ needs exemplifies the importance of a safe space where teachers share their challenges and their learning with students.

The last featured article by Cynthia Ryman and Rebecca Ballenger is about the Teen Reading Ambassador Program (TRAP) at Worlds of Words: Center of Global Literacies and Literatures in the University of Arizona College of Education. Through TRAP, high school teens who have a love of literature gain university experience and share their experience with their peers by promoting reading in their school communities. This program shows the TRAP program’s growth from a new initiative to recent reflections on the hurdles teen ambassadors overcame along the way, including the arrival of COVID-19 and the need to quickly adapt to an online format. This vignette reflects various challenges which grew to be enriching opportunities for imagination, adaptation, and growth. Teen ambassadors show the representation of a space where teens show their power in promoting global literature for young people.

Finally, we are excited to feature the first WOW Visual Stories written by Mikayla Carter. Mikayla recalls the excitement she felt as she was assigned her first classroom–half of the students spoke Spanish as their first language, a language she was not fluent in. Mikayla engaged students in a culturally enriching curriculum and the class become more adventurous during Hispanic Heritage month by selecting Guatemala as a focus Latin culture. A Guatemalan student became a resource for their inquiry study. This vignette sums up their classroom as a produced social space that is physical and representational. Mikayla’s reflection dismantles discourse on and about the classroom as a perceived space that started awkwardly but grew within their journey as a classroom.

In this issue, we noted a notable increase in the representation of transnational Asian authors, even though it was not a deliberate focus for the call for manuscripts. The diverse voices of teacher educators invite us to experience various types of communities, resources, and the importance of creating safe and accepting spaces for diverse communities. These spaces recognize voices, heritage languages, challenges, and diverse texts through different forms of power dynamics. As we continue to explore community literacy practices, let us remain mindful of the rich diversity of voices and experiences that contribute to the fabric of our educational landscapes.

Reference
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Editions Anthropos.

Yoo Kyung Sung, Lead editor
Julia López-Robertson, Co-editor

Authors retain copyright over the vignettes published in this journal and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the following Creative Commons License:

WOW Stories, Volume XI, Issue 1 by Worlds of Words is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on by Yoo Jyung Sung and Julia López-Robertson work at https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/stories/xi-1/2.

WOW stories: connections from the classroom
ISSN 2577-0551