91探花

Deadline for Submission: January 8, 2027

鈥淚鈥檓 on the verge of creating artificial intelligence. It鈥檚 a discovery that will change the world.鈥�

鈥擲teve Urkel on the show, Family Matters (1991)

In 1992, a ghost began writing to a group of children in Brooklyn.

It could not speak. It could not hear. It could read. It could write. Words were how it entered their world.

For a generation of young viewers, PBS鈥檚 Ghostwriter made literacy mysterious, communal, consequential, and extraordinarily cool. Jamal, Lenni, Alex, Gaby, Tina, Rob, and H茅ctor read closely, collected clues, filled notebooks, questioned texts, and wrote back to an entity they did not entirely understand. With the writing ghost, a whole new level of their literacy practices was unlocked.

More than three decades later, the Ghost is still writing. But today, the Ghost is no longer just writing exclusively to a small team of children assisting them in decoding cryptic messages, solving petty but important crimes in the neighborhood and working together to decipher its messages. The ghost we are contending with today is permeating every aspect of our lives.

A year later, Octavia Butler gifted readers with a prophetic offering in Parable of the Sower (1993). She imagined a world shaped by political insecurity, widening inequality, environmental crisis, and social fragmentation. Feel familiar? She imagined what we would experience in the year 2024.

Butler taught readers something important about imagined futures: Speculation can help us recognize the trajectories already unfolding around us. Perhaps that is what speculative stories have always offered us: not necessarily predictions, but rehearsals of a future in which we will one day exist.

Ghostwriter and Butler, in radically different ways, were asking audiences to imagine futures that do not like fiction today.

Generative artificial intelligence has entered classrooms, homes, phones, writing processes, and conversations about literacy education with astonishing speed. It can automate stories, revise sentences, summarize texts, mimic genres, answer questions, and produce language in response to our own. What once belonged comfortably to speculative fiction and the imagination now sits blinking inside a browser window. Flash forward, what was once speculative, is now reality.

But Ghostwriter was not the only early-1990s text asking us to imagine what might happen when human beings build technologies intended to make life easier, smarter, safer, or more efficient.

In the episode 鈥淩obo-Nerd鈥� of Family Matters (1991), suspenders rockin’ Steve Urkel introduced an “unparalleled electronic achievement,鈥� as he described to his baffled buds. Urkelbot was an extension of himself and human ingenuity: a technological helper designed to assist. When asked how he was able to control it, Steve responded with, “that’s the beauty part. Urkelbot has artificial intelligence; he can walk, talk and think all by himself.” This, in fact, was a bit too true. Urkelbot also became a warning. The machine created to help could act beyond its creator鈥檚 intentions, becoming destructive and threatening the very people it was meant to serve. In that sense, Urkelbot belongs to a much older Frankensteinian tradition: the story of the thing we make with good intentions, only to discover that creation does not guarantee control.

That tension feels especially urgent now. We are sitting with a deluge of questions, even when we do not yet have the language to articulate all of them: What happens when destruction becomes a byproduct of our desire to build a better, faster, more efficient world? What happens when technologies designed to extend human possibility also intensify existing forms of inequity? What happens when the infrastructure required to sustain artificial intelligence is not somewhere abstract 鈥渋n the cloud,鈥� but physically situated in communities already contending with environmental burdens, disinvestment, inadequate infrastructure, and limited access to affordable, fresh, nutritious food? And what does it mean when children live, learn, read, write, imagine, and grow in the same communities being asked to absorb the material costs of technologies that promise to transform their futures?

These are literacy questions too.

Because artificial intelligence is not simply a tool that produces text. It is a computer system made by people, trained on human language, powered by physical infrastructures and natural resources, shaped by economic and political decisions, and embedded within communities. To teach young people about AI, then, is not only to teach them how to prompt it, create with it, critique its responses, or detect its errors. It is also to help them ask who benefits, who bears the costs, whose language becomes data, whose knowledge becomes training material, whose communities provide the resources, and whose futures are being imagined.

Ghostwriter asked children what they would do when something they did not fully understand began writing to them.

Urkelbot asked what might happen when a technological assistant exceeded the intentions of its maker.

Frankenstein asked what responsibility creators have for what they bring into the world.

Octavia asked us to pay attention not simply to spectacular technological change but to the social conditions surrounding it: to power, scarcity, inequality, community, adaptation, and survival.

And now those questions are sitting with our students, with us, and in our classrooms and schools.

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For this themed issue of Language Arts, we invite educators, researchers, practitioners, students, families, and young people to consider what artificial intelligence means for the present and future of literacy. What kind of world we are building alongside it, and how will we prepare young people to read that world, question it, write with and against it, imagine something different, and decide when not to answer at all? We are particularly interested in work that moves beyond the binary of embracing or banning AI and instead asks more nuanced questions:

• What counts as writing when machines can generate language, and what happens to authorship, voice, creativity, intellectual ownership, and agency?
• How are children already encountering and making meaning with AI, and what literacies do they need to question, verify, remix, resist, or refuse what machines produce?
• What happens when technologies created to assist begin shaping the very thinking, writing, and decision-making they were designed to support?
• What might Frankenstein, Urkelbot, Ghostwriter, and other popular culture teach us about creation, responsibility, unintended consequences, and technological futures?
• How might AI reproduce linguistic, racial, cultural, gendered, and economic inequities, and what happens when some language practices, stories, and ways of knowing are treated as more legitimate, intelligible, or valuable than others?
• What are the environmental and community consequences of AI鈥檚 physical infrastructure, and how might young people engage multiple literacy practices to investigate what data centers, energy use, water consumption, and technological development mean for the places where they live, learn, play, breathe, read, write, and grow?
• How do teachers preserve the deeply human dimensions of literacy, like imagination, uncertainty, struggle, conversation, revision, creativity, and community, especially when efficiency and frictionlessness are increasingly presented as desirable ends?
• What do children gain or lose when difficulty becomes something technology is expected to eliminate, and what kinds of thinking, relationships, and discoveries emerge precisely because reading and writing require time and struggle?
• And perhaps most importantly: If the ghost(s) can write, what do we want our children to learn to do that the ghost(s) cannot?

We welcome classroom-based accounts, research articles, practitioner inquiries, critical essays, multimodal work, youth writing, conversations with children and families, and other contributions that help the Language Arts community think critically and imaginatively about literacy in an age of artificial intelligence.

July 2026: Looking Ahead to an Imagined but Not Yet Realized Future
No longer accepting submissions.
As our tenure as editors draws to a close, we want to revisit the sentiments that informed our initial decision to pursue this editorship. Initially, we envisioned our role as activists, working to uplift visions of literacy that contributed to more transformative ends. Specifically, we sought to: (1) amplify participatory research frameworks that honor diverse ways of knowing; (2) contribute to the development of pedagogical approaches that honor and sustain the languages, cultures, and identities of students, and (3) position children as full human beings who are agents of change. As we look back, we can鈥檛 help but wonder what the imagined but not yet realized future of language arts looks like for K鈥�8 learners and educators. Some questions we hope to consider for our final issue include: What do collaboration and solidarity look like in ELA classrooms so that students are positioned to lay claim to their infinite potential? What kinds of futures should we be collectively striving toward? How are our pedagogies embracing metaphors of contribution and daring? What does it truly look like when students are positioned in agentive ways to be activists in their educational futures? We recognize that to remember is to invent and we invite you to be inventors with us and imagine ways forward as it relates to literacy and the language arts for children in grades K鈥�8.

May 2026: Visions & Viewpoints
No longer accepting submissions.
For this unthemed issue, we invite Feature Article and Perspectives on Practice submissions that offer a variety of viewpoints and visions related to language arts across multiple settings and modalities. What topics, concerns, or issues do you think are important to today鈥檚 readers of Language Arts? How are language arts teachers and researchers responding to contemporary societal issues and their influence on educational spaces? What kinds of theoretical lenses have you applied to your inquiry work to increase our collective understandings of language arts instruction; furthermore, how are these inquiries informing and expanding theoretical frameworks? How are children鈥檚 multiple languages and cultures being sustained across learning spaces, including classrooms, homes, and community settings? How are educators, researchers, families, and children working together to enact critical pedagogies that are humanizing and transformative? These are just a few of the many questions that can be explored in this issue. Join us in crafting an assortment of articles that helps to expand our viewpoints and visions about children and the language arts.