Our classrooms are built on stories–the ones we choose to share, the ones our students write, and the ones we dare to create. Everyday, we witness the ways stories affirm students’ identities, fuel their imaginations, build their empathy, and increase their social awareness. Our classrooms are where we make space for them to make sense of the world and themselves, to take risks and grapple with complex ideas. Our classrooms are sites of imagination and joy, compassion and courage, possibility and promise.

Beyond our classrooms, there is a very different narrative being told about what we do. The stories about education right now are daunting, and the discourse about teachers is demoralizing. As teachers of reading and writing, we are in a unique position to rewrite the narrative about what we teach, what our students are capable of, and what is possible in the ELA classroom. It’s not just hope that we need but what Jeff Duncan-Andrade calls critical hope, which rejects “the despair of hopelessness” and “demands a committed and active struggle” for something better. To rewrite the narrative with critical hope means to reject the limiting portrayals of education and reimagine a future with possibility, justice, and joy at its core.

In her powerful TED Talk The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us that even though “stories have been used to dispossess and to malign…stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.” We invite you–English teachers, literacy leaders, teacher educators, and school librarians–to submit proposals that rewrite the narrative to empower and humanize teaching and learning toward critical hope.