https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4647-3834
GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Our Delphi panel priority setting exercise (EIE 55:4, November 2021) revealed that issues of social justice and race were among respondents’ top three priorities for English education research. Consequently, the last issue of EIE (57:3) focused on Social Justice, and the next (58:1) will address Race, Language and (In)equality. Future special issues will take inspiration from other highly rated topics: next year’s special issue on Subject Associations may well address priority 4, the nature and integrity of the subject. The topics of Critical Literacy and Social Media were lower in the list of participants’ priorities, but both are clearly of current concern, despite (or because of) their invisibility in the official curriculum. As I argued in a recent editorial (EIE 57:2), the absence of the term “Knowledge about Language” in the 2022 Curriculum Research Review of English published by Ofsted, the UK school inspection authority, implies a wilful neglect of the long tradition of critical media study in English education.
For these reasons, I was delighted to invite Navan Govender and Jennifer Farrar to edit this special issue on Critical Literacies and Social Media. The initial call for papers produced fewer papers than we had hoped for, possibly because these topics are not currently included in the assessment regime. After trying our authors’ patience while we deliberated on whether to go ahead or to postpone publication until next year, we decided to publish a hybrid issue.
Accordingly, this issue comprises two sections. The guest editors’ introductory article overleaf offers a valuable overview of current approaches to Critical Literacies and Social Media and introduces three articles on ways in which teachers and students engage with critical visual literacies. This is followed by a separate section containing two articles on facilitating young people’s writing in very different forms. Kimberley Pager-Clymont and Evangelia Papathanasiou explore ways in which conceptual metaphors and associated kinaesthetic learning activities supported students in learning to write academic essays. Lauren Weber and her colleagues examine the interaction between young writers’ developing sense of literary aesthetics and their exploration of moral questions. They argue that providing children with opportunities for authentic writing experiences in terms of audience and purpose supports their aesthetic and moral development as writers.