page 165 Language Arts, Volume 99, Number 3, January 2022 Joy is crucial for social change; joy is crucial for teaching. Finding joy in the midst of pain and trauma is the fght to be fully human. A revolutionary spirit that embraces joy, self-care, and love is moving towards wholeness. Acknowledging joy is to make yourself aware of your humanity, creativity, self-determination, power, and ability to love abundantly. Freedom dreams are brought to life through joy and love of dark people’s light. Joy makes the quest for justice sustainable. (Love, 2019, pgs. 119–20) We are proud to leverage this issue as a plat- form to center the importance of joy—particularly Black joy—in our collective struggle for a more just world. In their powerful calls for and models of antiracist English language arts pedagogies, scholars like Bettina Love (2019) and Gholnecsar Muhammad (2019) both emphasize joy as a critical (and often missing) component of learning. With her historically responsive literacy model (2019), Muhammad challenges us as educators to ask our- selves questions about children’s brilliance and joy, such as “How does our curriculum and instruction respond to or build upon students’ knowledge and mental powers?” and “How does our curriculum and instruction elevate beauty, truth, and happi- ness in humanity?” (Muhammad & Mosley, 2021, p. 194). Inspired by this thinking, and with an inter- est in how elementary and early childhood educa- tors are doing the work of centering joy in school and ELA pedagogies, we solicited manuscripts for this themed issue exploring the joyful and brilliant engagements of children and youth as they read, write, speak, and explore their worlds in critically engaged ways. We are pleased to share two feature articles and one Perspectives on Practice piece. In “‘History Is a Way of Building Identity’: How One Elementary Independent Neighborhood School Uses Black Cultural Movements to Engage Children’s Socio- political Perspectives,” Wintre Foxworth John- son illustrates how one elementary school centers Black history as a liberatory literacy pedagogy and practice. Mary Beth Snow Balderas, Molly Hamm- Rodríguez, Vanessa Santiago Schwarz, and Mileidis Gort, in their piece “Resisting High Stakes Educa- tional Reform through Genre Writing in a Multilin- gual Classroom,” examine how one second grade teacher engaged the brilliance of multilingual stu- dent writers and resisted the educational survival tactics (Love, 2019) shaping literacy instruction at her school by using systemic functional linguistics genre pedagogy. Finally, in “Planning for Book Joy: Reconceptualizing Power in Literacy Instruc- tion,” Katie Egan Cunningham and Grace Enriquez “encourage fellow educators to rethink our prac- tices to empower children to take action in their lives, individually and collectively, and to know their brilliance and worthiness, particularly in their relationships with books.” And you won’t want to miss the columns in this issue! In the Research and Policy column edited by Brian Kissel, Gholnecsar Muhammad has written a Rick Coppola, Kara Taylor, Sandra L. Osorio, and Rebecca Woodard Editors’ Introduction: Centering Children’s Joy and Brilliance in Schools