Awards

ELATE James N. Britton Award

Congratulations to the 2023 Recipients!

Mollie V. Blackburn, Moving Across Differences: How Students Engage LGBTQ+ Themes in a High School Literature Class

Mollie Blackburn is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning and is affiliated with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Moving across Differences: How Students Engage LGBTQ+ Themes in a High-school Literature Class and the editor of Adventurous Thinking: Fostering Students’ Rights to Read and Write in Secondary ELA Classrooms. She received NCTE’s LGBTQ+ Advocacy and Leadership Award and AERA’s Queer Studies Special Interest Group’s Body of Work Award.

Alison G. Dover and Fernando (Ferran) Rodríguez-Valls, Radically Inclusive Teaching with Newcomer and Emergent Plurilingual Students: Braving Up

Dr. Alison G. Dover is a former English Language Arts teacher and a Professor at California State University, Fullerton. Her scholarship focuses on enactments of equity, social justice, critical literacy, and culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies in K–12 and teacher education. Dover is widely published in the fields of literacy and teacher education and, in 2023, received the AACTE Outstanding Journal of Teacher Education Article Award for her collaborative research examining racial climate in teacher education.

Dr. Fernando Rodríguez-Valls is Professor at California State University, Fullerton. Dr. Rodríguez-Valls has created partnerships with school districts and local educational agencies to develop and implement community-based [bi/-pluri]literacy programs. At CSUF, Fernando coordinates the Bilingual Authorization Program and the World Languages Program. As a scholar, Dr. Rodríguez-Valls’ publications focus on equitable and linguistically inclusive methodologies for emergent plurilingual, newcomer, and [im]migrant students as well as on the socio-cultural factors affecting their academic achievement, educational continuity, and school engagement.

Award Details

Nomination Deadline: May 1 in odd-numbered years; the next award will be given in 2025

Purpose:
To encourage English Language Arts teacher development, consistent with the major goal of ELATE, by promoting classroom-based research in which teachers at any educational level raise questions about teaching and learning in their own teaching/learning settings.

“It is the continual reformulation of what we know in the light of what we perceive that matters: and the hardening of what we know into a formula that we apply ready-made instead of reformulating – that is the danger. Thus, our most powerful ideas are relatively general, relatively unformulated starting points from which we constantly reformulate……Research findings are things we can know which could have bearing on what we do when we teach. And ‘development’ should be the name of the process of bringing this kind of knowing into relationship with this kind of doing.” p. 150-James N. Britton, A Note on Teaching, Research and ‘Development’ in Prospect and Retrospect: Selected Essays of James Britton. Edited by G.M.Pradl, Boyton/Cook, 1982.

Eligibility:
Works eligible for the 2025 Award must have been published between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2024.

Award Criteria:

1. Nominated work should represent classroom based research conducted by an English Language Arts Teacher at any level–preschool through university.
2. Published in any format/modality, including books, articles, and digital illustrations of model practices in the field, during the two-year time period under consideration.
3. Focused on a systematic study of any aspect of the inquirer’s own teaching, including collaborative research with other practitioners.

Award Specifics:
The Britton Award is presented in odd-numbered years, effective January 2014. Nominations accompanied by three copies of the published material, if possible, may be made by any Language Arts educator or by self-nomination. Nominations for studies published between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2024, must be received no later than May 1, 2025. Submit nominations to elate@ncte.org.

Winners will be notified in July 2025 and announced at the 2025 NCTE Annual Convention.