Each year the Standing Committee on Affiliates awards its highest honor, the NCTE Affiliate Excellence Award, to affiliates that meet high standards of performance for affiliate programming to promote improvement in the teaching of the English language arts.
This year seven affiliates will be recognized at the Affiliate Breakfast on Sunday morning of the NCTE Annual Convention in Minneapolis. All these affiliates have won this award multiple times, maintaining and enhancing their programming to serve literacy educators in their areas. Listed below are the seven to be honored along with one or two outstanding programs that make them excellent:
• Colorado Language Arts Society for its twelfth year. CLAS cultivates partnerships with the Colorado, Denver, and CSU Writing Projects to sponsor a Colorado Day of Writing.
• Georgia Council of Teachers of English for its thirteenth year. GCTE publishes a strong open source newsletter and sponsors a Future Teacher of Color Program.
• Iowa Council of Teachers of English for its second year. ICTE holds a session at its conference based on materials from the Kettering Foundation. The session is designed for all present to discuss various education issues and the affiliate’s president participates in the discussion in order to gain information s/he can take into the world and use when speaking for the Iowa Council. As this year’s session facilitator James Davis noted,
“I see it as a worthy effort, enacting the notion that unless one endeavors somewhat systematically to interact with colleagues and gather diverse perspective, one is able to be a representative teacher but not a teacher representative.”
• Ohio Council of Teachers of English Language Arts for its eighth year. OCTELA has adopted a long list of position statements to support the teaching and learning of literacy.
• Oregon Council of Teachers of English for its fifth year. OCTE has developed cross-institutional projects with the Department of Education and school districts in the state, such as the Oregon Encyclopedia Project.
• Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts for its seventh year. TCTELA keeps its members in touch with legislators during its Literacy Education Day at the state capitol.
• Virginia Association of Teachers of English for its seventh year. VATE sponsors an annual “Literacy Explosion” and African American Read-In Activities –see the newsletter on these.