Karis Jones (PhD) is an assistant professor in the Curriculum & Instruction Department at Baylor University. As a literacy scholar, teacher educator, and community organizer, her research relates to issues of equity in literacies learning and writing across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces. She has been a member of NCTE since 2017.
Sarah Jerasa (PhD) is an assistant professor in the Literacy, Language, and Cultures program in the Department of Education and Human Development at Clemson University. Her research examines digital literacies in social media that support reading, writing, and teacher education and teacher identity formation through digital discourse and multimodalities.
Rabani Garg (PhD) is a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She designs and studies networked environments for learning and literacy across formal and informal, cross-cultural contexts, in collaboration with diverse learning communities, with a commitment to creating transformational and equitable, technology-rich learning spaces. Across her work, Garg is guided by deep commitments to youth voice, educator collaboration, and equitable design in digital learning environments, as well as to building critical orientations to platforms.
Trevor Aleo (EdD) is a high school English teacher and adjunct lecturer at Fairfield University. As a teacher-scholar exploring the convergence of new media and the humanities, he researches how high school youths use digital, critical, and disciplinary literacies to create literary knowledge. In addition to his research, he is passionate about bringing that scholarly work to fellow teachers through his public scholarship and professional learning workshops.
Now Accepting Nominations for the 2026 ELATE National Technology Leadership Fellowship Award
Award Details
Deadline: November 13, 2026, by 11:59 p.m. PT
Nominations to be emailed to: William J. Fassbender
Each year, English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) identifies a recipient of the ELATE National Technology Leadership Fellowship Award. The award provides an opportunity to present at the annual Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE) international conference in 2027 (date and location to be announced, https://site.aace.org/conf/), with a complimentary conference registration. The award winner is still responsible for travel costs.
All NCTE members, especially ELATE members, are encouraged to nominate themselves or a colleague whose accepted 2026 NCTE Annual Convention proposal demonstrates cutting-edge and generative methods of integrating newer technologies into teacher education courses or workshops. In addition to teacher education faculty and graduate students, preK–12 teachers may also be nominated.
The criteria for this award include NCTE 2024 sessions which:
- Focus on theoretically sound and research-based methods of teaching the English language arts/literacy in which the technology is a secondary rather than primary focus;
- Use technology to create beneficial opportunities for English language arts/literacy learning that could not exist without the technology;
- Improve students’ mastery of English language arts/literacy learning;
- Use technology to address challenges faced by many English language arts/literacy teachers and/or students or the broader community; or
- Introduce new methods for teaching the English language arts/literacy with the use of newer technologies in ways that show promise of working well in widely divergent educational settings.
Nominations must be e-mailed to D-LITE Committee Chair William J. Fassbender no later than November 13, 2026, by 11:59 p.m. PT. The subject line of the email should contain the subject NTLI Fellowship Award Application. Each nomination must include the following:
- Presenter’s name and contact information (home and school addresses and phone numbers),
- NCTE 2026 session title and description (and, if possible, the session number, day and time),
- A copy of the session proposal, and
- A brief statement explaining how the presentation illustrates the characteristics the award is intended to identify (see above bullet points)
The proposals will go through a blind peer-reviewed process and the award recipient will be notified before the close of the year.
NOTE: If you are interested in serving as a reviewer for this award, please contact William J. Fassbender to express interest.