Dearest Colleagues,

We bring you warm greetings from British Columbia and from Illinois, where the dreaded winter is past and the summer we have long waited for waits to greet us! As incoming InterCom co-editors, Natalia and I are excited about this wonderful opportunity to serve you in the upcoming year. We have been blessed to have Dr. Kris Acheson-Clair as our predecessor and we can only hope that we manage to fill her shoes!

In preparing for our first issue, we brainstormed long and hard, remembering the excellent ideas you shared at the TESOL 2015 convention. You will see that we made a special effort to reflect your thoughts and to focus in this issue, on intersections between intercultural communication and the arts. At a time when thinking about human sensitivity holds much promise for helping us to engage with concerns arising from difference, we agree that the arts have a significant potential for helping us communicate across national and international boundaries.

The articles in this issue, while they speak to our minds, whisper even more powerfully to our hearts! In an interview, Lakota artist Keith Braveheart shares thoughts about his work. As he speaks about his artwork, its connections to cultures and capacity to change the world, we are invited to see art as a catalyst for social change. Similarly, in another article, Karissa Weeden and Rachel Ewing demonstrate how theater arts helped them draw on the creativity and collaborative support structures of their English language learners to help them become more comfortable speakers of English. Across these articles, we realize the transformation that can result from integrating arts into our life’s work.

In closing, we want to thank those of you who contributed to this issue and to invite others to respond to our upcoming call for our second issue titled “ICC: A Critical Perspective”! We know you will enjoy this issue and we look forward to you being a part of the next! Thank you for all your support.

Yours in service,

Patriann Smith

Patriann Smith (PhD in literacy studies, University of South Florida, 2013) serves as a faculty member in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She teaches courses in reading and literacy and conducts research on language and literacy teaching, considering specifically the intercultural experiences of international multilingual educators. Patriann is an International Reading Association Hall of Fame Young Scholar (2013–2016) and a Literacy Research Association Scholar of Color Transitioning Into Academic Research Institutions (2015–2017). Patriann is excited about her most recent project, the Handbook of Research on Cross-Cultural Approaches to Language and Literacy Development, soon to appear in press (2015).