Content area
Full Text
Joy is crucial for social change; joy is crucial for teaching. Finding joy in the midst of pain and trauma is the fight to be fully human. A revolutionary spirit that embraces joy, self-care, and love is moving towards wholeness. Acknowledging joy is to make yourself aware of your humanity, creativity, self-determination, power, and ability to love abundantly. Freedom dreams are brought to life through joy and love of dark people's light. Joy makes the quest for justice sustainable. (Love, 2019,pgs. 119-20)
We are proud to leverage this issue as a platform to center the importance of joy-particularly Black joy-in our collective struggle for a more just world. In their powerful calls for and models of antiracist English language arts pedagogies, scholars like Bettina Love (2019) and Gholnecsar Muhammad (2019) both emphasize joy as a critical (and often missing) component of learning. With her historically responsive literacy model (2019), Muhammad challenges us as educators to ask ourselves questions about children's brilliance and joy, such as "How does our curriculum and instruction respond to or build upon students' knowledge and mental powers?" and "How does our curriculum and instruction elevate...