Special Issue: Special Issue Call for Papers: Visual- and Arts-based Approaches to Enhancing Multilingual Identities in Education

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:10:31 +0000

Special Issue: 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.

This special issue will bring to the forefront the transformative potential of arts-based and visual practices in helping learners see, shape, and share who they are; linguistically, culturally, and emotionally. It challenges reductive views of multilingual learners as passive recipients of instruction, re-centering their voices, visions, and lived experiences. It also provides a much-needed platform for methodological innovation in language education research and for intersectional conversations on identity, equity, and representation.

IJME Submission Guidelines

Register first with the IJME (ijme-journal.org) if you are not a registered user. Please ensure that you have checked the “author” option in your profile.
Follow the IJME submission guidelines (https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/about/submissions) available on the website. Use the article template when preparing your manuscript (https://tinyurl.com/IJME-Template). Manuscripts that do not follow the submission guidelines will not be reviewed.
Submit your manuscript directly through the IJME website. In addition, submit the author ethical checklist (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oikNpwfyy9TK7VqeLJIBb3PM23EGBeQ7/edit ) as a separate supplementary document and complete the metadata for your manuscript, as instructed on the journal’s submission webpage, by June 1, 2026.

IJME Selection Process of Manuscripts

Manuscripts will be judged based on their strength and relevance to the theme of the special issue and should align with the multicultural education mission of IJME.
Manuscripts must not have been previously published or be under consideration by another journal at the time of submission.
Each manuscript will be prescreened by the special issue editors for general suitability. Prescreened manuscripts will then undergo a double-blind review by a panel of experts in the field. Those manuscripts recommended by the review panel will be considered for final acceptance.

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

A Brief Introduction to IJME

The International Journal of Multicultural Education (IJME) is a free, peer-reviewed open-access journal for scholars, practitioners, and students of multicultural education. Committed to promoting educational equity for diverse students, cross-cultural understanding, and global justice for marginalized people in all levels of education, including leadership and policies, IJME publishes three types of articles: (1) qualitative research studies that explicitly address multicultural educational issues; (2) conceptual and theoretical articles, typically grounded on in-depth literature review, which advance theories and scholarship of multicultural education; and (3) praxis articles that discuss successful multicultural education practices grounded on sound theories and literature. We encourage submissions resulting from meaningful and ethical collaboration among international scholars and practitioners. Submissions that advance from prescreening will be subject to originality-testing and double-blind peer review. For further details, please visit the journal website at www.ijme-journal.org.

For questions or proposal inquiries, please contact the Guest Editors:

Sviatlana Karpava, karpava.sviatlana@ucy.ac.cy
Georgios Neokleous, neokleous@ntnu.no

International Journal of Multicultural Education: Announcements

Special Issue: Special Issue Call for Papers: Visual- and Arts-based Approaches to Enhancing Multilingual Identities in Education