Theme: Seeing Language: Visual- and Arts-based Approaches to Enhancing Multilingual Identities in Education
This special issue seeks to critically examine how visual and arts-based approaches can serve as transformative tools for fostering identity development, affirmation, and expression within multilingual and multicultural educational contexts. By moving beyond traditional language-based frameworks, we aim to foreground multimodal, creative, and affective ways of knowing that capture the rich complexity of learners’ linguistic and cultural identities. Our guiding question is: How can visual and arts-based approaches be used to explore, affirm, and represent multilingual identities across educational settings and age groups? Addressing this question allows contributors to advance methodological innovation while strengthening identity-affirming pedagogies in multilingual education.
We welcome empirical, theoretical, and practice-based contributions that illuminate how such approaches empower both students and educators to engage with language and identity in embodied and intersectional ways. The issue will highlight work that reimagines language education through visual storytelling, artistic production, and multimodal representation, ultimately challenging deficit discourses and monolingual ideologies that persist across educational settings. We hope to receive contributions from educators, researchers, teacher educators, artists, and community practitioners working across diverse educational settings.
Key themes include (but are not limited to):
- Visual and artistic representations of multilingual identities
- Student-created visual texts (zines, posters, journals, murals) as language and identity artifacts
- Art as a counter-narrative to deficit discourses in multilingual education
- Embodied, emotional, and sensory dimensions of identity in multilingual classrooms
- Identity formation and self-expression through drawing, collage, sculpture, or digital art
- Learner and teacher identity in heritage, immigrant, and refugee contexts
- Multimodal literacy practices in language teacher education
- Methodological innovations in visual and arts-based language research
- Participatory and community-centered arts-based approaches in multilingual education
Recommended Timeline
- January 15, 2026 – Call for Papers Released
- June 1, 2026 – Manuscript Submission Deadline
- September 1, 2026 – First Round Review & Revision Requests by Special Issue Editors
- October 15, 2026 – Author Revision Deadline
- November 15, 2026 – Final Acceptance Notification
- April 2027 – Publication of the Special Issue
See complete call and submission details here
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