A Note from the Editorial Team

Abstract

In 2020, as the Journal of College Reading and Learning (JCRL) celebrated its 50 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 PresidentElect 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 JOURNAL OF COLLEGE READING AND LEARNING 2022, VOL. 52, NO. 4, 227–229 https://doi.org/10.1080/10790195.2022.2128622