Types of Manuscripts Sought

In each issue, we publish a range of information and ideas. Our Call for Manuscript has details on current and future issue's focus. We welcome submissions and inquiries for the following sections of the journal.

• are often, but not exclusively, concerned with topics designated by the issue theme. Themes for upcoming issues are included in current issues of OJELA and on the OCTELA website.

• includes short descriptions of classroom ideas and activities, poetry and literacy vignettes.

•accepts poetry submissions with teaching or teaching-related subjects for review.  Submitters should follow the Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

•spotlights Teaching Matters and, as a result, invites submissions focused on classroom strategies for teaching English language arts at any level, K-college.  Submissions must be original teaching ideas.  Descriptions of activities, practices, and procedures are welcome, but these should be accompanied by rationale, explaining how methods were developed and used and for what purposes.  Submissions might include a lesson’s objectives, materials, target grade level, appropriate assessments, and classroom handouts.  Teaching Matters submissions should build a kind of how-to knowledge for other teachers.

•invites submissions from various educational levels (elementary, middle, secondary, post-secondary) to provide a perspective on a specific question related to an individual issue’s theme.  The goal of the 4Sites section is to provide perspective on an educational issue across sites and levels.  We’re accepting submissions for the following issues, loosely focused on the question that follows the issue’s theme.

• The Well-Prepared English Teacher:  Where and how did you learn what has best prepared you for the classroom?
• Academic Memoir:  Stories of Learning:  What personal story do you use in your classroom for pedagogical purposes?

•invokes the metaphor of the table to promote conversation.  One goal for this OJELA section is to provide opportunity for professional development but not in a top-down, lecture style.  Instead, we ask submissions to capture the way books and articles in the field are used in classrooms and in professional lives, to convey experiences that illustrate the significance of our professional literature.  Submissions should be related to each issue’s proposed theme.

Submit to:  jmbuchanan@ysu.edu or ojelaeditor@gmail.com

OJELA CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS
 

The Well-Prepared English Teacher
Volume 52.1  (Winter/Spring 2012)
Deadline:  March 15, 2012

“Highly Qualified” is a adverb/adjective pair Ohio teachers have become accustomed to hearing.  The state adopted the designation in response to a federal mandate requiring that it show evidence of its teachers’ qualifications to teach.  The designation is well-intentioned, but, in practice, “highly qualified” has come to mean the pursuit of a graduate degree, 30+ hours of coursework in the content area, National Board Certification, and 90 hours of professional development.  What has been lost is thoughtful consideration of what, foundationally, prepares one best to teach.

With the Winter/Spring 2012 issue of OJELA, we propose to shift the conversation away from qualifications, and the superficial evidence of those qualifications, to preparation, and the complex theoretical and pedagogical knowledge that informs our teaching.  We are asking you, What does it mean to be well-prepared?  What does being well-prepared require?  What do English/language arts teachers have to know and be able to do to teach effectively?  How do we continue to prepare ourselves every day, every semester, every year for the work we do in our classrooms?

We invite submissions, then, from administrators, trying to meet accountability requirements; classroom teachers, searching for ways to improve their effectiveness; English educators, working to prepare future English teachers; mentor teachers, resident educators, supervisors, specialists, and consultants, charged with supporting the work of teachers.  What is a well-prepared English teacher?

Academic Memoir: Stories of Learning
Volume 52.2  (Summer/Fall 2012)
Deadline:  September 15, 2012

Memoirs reflect on a limited period of time and of personal experience; they are episodic.  Memoir writing that focuses on time in school, time as a student or as a teacher, writing that focuses on learning or being educated, have become almost conventional.

Because learning is powerful, it changes us.  And when we are moved to change, we often feel an impulse to account for it.  For as teachers, we are especially attuned to learning, its processes and implications, the impulse to talk about our own learning and the learning around us is almost second nature.  As learners and teachers, we tell stories of these kinds of changes and encourage our students to do the same.  We sometimes can’t help ourselves—after encounters with transformative texts, when we have found our pedagogical sea legs, when theory and practice finally wed.  These stories—about the powerful effects of learning—have come, too, to have a genre:  academic memoir.

The stories of academic memoir are both personal and professional; this is a genre in which the two merge.  For the Summer/Fall 2012 issue of OJELA, we invite submissions in and on the genre of academic memoir.  We invite stories that attempt to capture the effects of teaching and learning for both teachers and students, to account for professional growth and to explain how and what our students gain, and to develop a sense of efficacy for us and our students’ in this place we call school.

Questions? Jeff Buchanan • English Dept., Youngstown State University, One University Plaza, Youngstown, Ohio 44555  • jmbuchanan@ysu.edu

PAST ISSUES

To download a PDF file of OJELA click on the issue.

Volume 45.1

Volume 45.2

If you are a current member of the Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts (OCTELA) issues of the Ohio Journal of English Language Arts (OJELA) will be mailed to you when printed. Previously printed issues of OJELA are available in limited numbers for a price of $10.00. Contact the editors for more information about which issues are still in print.

Members may also access some issues on-line as PDF files. Copies may be printed from the on-line versions for educational purposes only. Contact the individual authors for permission to reprint specific articles. Please be advised that these files may be too large to download if you are using a slow internet connection or older computer.

Contact information may have changed for journals more than 3-years-old as Editors serve for only 3 years. If you are interested in a journal that is more than 3-years-old please contact OCTELA. (Issue 44.1–Fall 2004, marked the beginning term of the editors listed below.)

Return printed form to:

Jeff Buchanan
English Department
Youngstown State University
One University Plaza
Youngstown, OH 44555

or email to:
jmbuchanan@ysu.edu

OJELA Reviewer Comment Form
Reviewers: Your comments are crucial to decisions about publishing these manuscripts. Please provide details describing the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript. Your comments will be sent to the editors and the authors. Phrase comments in a respectful and reflective manner.

Reviewer's Form - print this PDF form and mail to Jeff Buchanan or fill out a Word document and send it as an attachment.

The above listed Word document may be completed online, saved and emailed. You can open the Word document and use it for the manuscript you are reviewing now or save the Word document as a template and use it each time you are sent a manuscript. As you fill in your selections or comments, the grey boxes will expand.  Once you complete the document, assign the form a unique name i.e. Manuscript 48.1:01 and save it to a folder or your desktop.  If you do not rename the file, you cannot use it as a blank template for future reviews. Make sure you keep the .doc extension. Once the form is saved, attach it to an email addressed to jmbuchanan@ysu.edu.  It works most reliably in Internet Explorer 5 and above.