Designing a systematic inquiry-based, and knowledge-building experience through continuous professional learning for teachers is a key challenge for school authorities. A total of 26 teachers, five principals, three researchers, one graduate student, and two contract professionals from a university were involved in a research-practice partnership. The partners engaged in a yearlong design-based professional learning series. In this study, design-based research was used as the methodology to understand the participant responses to professional learning during the design, enactment, and refinement phases used to design the professional learning series. Open-ended survey responses, researcher field notes and documents from the professional learning sessions were analyzed throughout the study and during three phases of the learning design. The results indicated there were four key shifts and corresponding adaptations made by the participants as they responded to and engaged in a continuous model of professional learning.

In this article, we examine young children’s narrative play as posthuman, collaborative composing assemblages. Thinking with Tsing (2015), we re/consider collaboration as that which benefits from contamination and unruly edges as lively and generative places can help educators to notice and nurture that which easily goes unnoticed. We are guided by the question of what could be learned about generating literacy learning opportunities for young children in an outdoor program focused on setting up conditions for collaborative, narrative play. Posthuman perspectives deriving from the philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari, often utilize the concept of the rhizome. However, following the scholarship of posthuman philosopher Anna Tsing and mycologist, Merlin Sheldrake, we turn to another more-than-human lifeform and introduce the construct of mycelial networks for posthuman literacy studies. For this study of children’s collaborative composing, we work with Tsing’s concepts of unruly edges and contamination as collaboration and introduce the concept of the in/visible. Taking up Tsing’s invitation to think differently about the construction of knowledge practices, we map and examine children’s collaborative storying by providing two vignettes, which together, comprise a rush of troubled stories. The troubled stories were part of an awakening for program facilitators, a space of four weeks in which they came to see that by attuning to the liveliness of the children’s movements, their understanding of collaborative narrative play was transformed. As relations between the human children and facilitators and the more-than-human vividly animate in this study, the in/visible moments that erupt along the interface between the domesticated and the wild can guide educators in planning and enacting young children’s literacy learning. To foster children’s collaborative composing, we assert, it is necessary to trust that storying occurs, for many children, in the underground, in/visible spaces that underpin the stories they play.

COVID-19 a perturbé la vie des enfants, des adolescents, leurs familles, leurs communautés et les enseignants. À mesure que l'accès et la participation aux expériences éducatives en salle de classe furent influencés par la santé publique générale, l'enseignement des langues et des littératies ont dû se resituer face aux changements à travers les modes de textes, l'interactivité et l'exécution en contextes sociaux, familiaux et scolaires. Cette période prolongée d'incertitude généralisée ainsi que les résurgences au niveau viral, social et politique ont favorisé une vision déficitaire de l'époque. Tout en reconnaissant que cette période de la pandémie a contribué à de formes multiples de pertes, de gains et d'interruptions, le but de ce numéro spécial est de donner une attention particulière aux moments d'espoir en enseignement de la langue et de la littératie, de reconnaître l'apprentissage qui a eu lieu et de se pencher vers les possibilités pédagogiques en envisageant un avenir post pandémie.

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the lives of children and youth, their families, communities, and teachers. As access to and participation in classroom learning experiences was affected by changing public health conditions, language and literacy education was correspondingly resituated across modes of text, interactivity, and enactment in social, familial, and educative contexts. It was also predominantly framed in terms of deprivation and deficit. Recognizing that the pandemic, the prolonged period of uncertainty it generated, and its ongoing viral, social, and political resurgences have brought multiple forms of loss, gain, disruption and nurturance to the fore, the aim of this special issue is to give attention to the hopeful language and literacy teaching and learning that occurred in its midst, and the possibilities they might offer a post-pandemic future.

The presence of school leadership standards in graduate education has come to influence the scope and content of leadership programs, highlighting tensions between political, practical, and scholarly views of leaders and leadership. This paper reports on a study of instructional practices within a graduate program in educational leadership connected to the Alberta Leadership Quality Standard to explore how instructors, as policy actors, encounter leadership standards not just as policies of compliance but of possibility. We interpret interview data from three faculty members through the lens of policy enactment to understand how their instruction negotiated relationships of theory and practice and how they negotiated the policy-based regulatory discourses associated with school leadership standards. Working between images of policy standards as text and discourse, findings show instructors engaged in dialogic commitments that help students develop practical and scholarly competencies while displacing the authority of standards, recontextualizing the standardization of leadership, and displacing the standards’ normative gaze.