'We could hardly have imagined what the immediate 'Futures for English' would look like when we set out the call for papers for this Special Edition in 2019. As we write this Editorial, the world has been plunged into online and home-based schooling in response to the 'once in a century' COVID-19 pandemic: it is impossible, in the midst of this, to conceive what English, or indeed schooling will look like in the next months and years. English teachers at all stages of school and tertiary education have rapidly developed or expanded technological literate practices, as students encounter new approaches to the reading and production of texts in different forms and spaces. In Australia, this worldwide crisis follows an intense and unprecedented period of bushfire, where lives and livelihoods were lost, towns and national parks razed, smoke blanketed major cities, and dystopian accounts of destruction and survival dominated the media. We know that the stories that come from these unprecedented, life-changing local and global events will impact the nature of the texts we read and produce, and therefore the nature of subject English which has, since its inception, been responsive to changing contexts, discourses and social imperatives (McLean Davies, Doecke & Mead, 2013) (Editorial introduction)
