Distinguished Service Award
Applications are now open for NCTE Board of Directors members, affiliate presidents, and liaison officers to submit per the award guidelines below. Contact NCTEAwards@ncte.org for details. Deadline is May 15!
2023 Recipient: David Bloome
The Ohio State University
David Bloome is professor emeritus in the Department of Teaching and Learning of The Ohio State University College of Education and Human Ecology. Bloome’s research focuses on how people use spoken and written language for learning in classroom and non-classroom settings and how people use language to create and maintain social relationships, to construct knowledge, and to create communities, social institutions, and shared histories and futures. Bloome’s current scholarship focuses on the social construction of intertextuality, discourse analysis, narrative performance and development, students as researchers and ethnographers of their own communities, and the teaching and learning of argumentative writing. Among the leadership positions Bloome has held are president of the National Council of Teachers of English and president of the National Council of Research on Language and Literacy. Bloome is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Distinguished Scholar Award from the National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy and the John J. Gumperz Lifetime Achievement Award from AERA Language and Social Processes SIG. Bloome is currently a coeditor of Research in the Teaching of English, former coeditor of Reading Research Quarterly, and former coeditor and the founder of Linguistics and Education. Bloome is the author or coauthor of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. He is the author or coauthor of 11 books and editor or coeditor of seven books.
“In Kadya Molodowsky’s children’s poem ‘Olke’ (found in Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky), a six-year-old child of a poor family wants to play with her blue parasol, pretending to knead bread and inviting her friends to join her. But she cannot play. Like her parents, she must work—there’s no time for play. She wants to walk with the geese but must peel the potatoes instead; she would like to read and write, but there is wood to split, diapers to fold, a baby to hold. She has to sew and repair some buttons, but they fall to the ground and magically become wheels and a train. They take her far, far away. In Yiddish, the rhythm of the poem pushes the reader on, as if Olke’s escape is gaining momentum until finally there is the quiet of her traveling far, far away.
“Every time I read Molodowsky’s poem, it pierces me with a sharp sadness. When I read it with my grandchildren they always want to know, ‘Where did Olke go? Where did the train take her?’ They say it is so unfair that she had to work so hard. At first, they say Olke’s parents were mean, but then they backtrack, ‘maybe they had to work that hard—that’s so unfair.’ Then they get sad in a strange way—a tragic sense of guilted relief.
“What has become of us literacy educators, researchers, and parents that reading and writing have become labor, something to own, a competition with winners and losers, a thing to capitalize, quantify, and monetize for its exchange value? I have come to believe that we feel Olke’s pain and disappearance because it is our pain and our disappearance. If we are not careful, it will be our grandchildren’s pain and they too will ‘fort avek, het vayt, het vayt’ (travel away, far, far away).”
Award Details
Overview
This award was established in 1950 as the W. Wilbur Hatfield Award and renamed the Distinguished Service Award in 1969. The award recognizes a person or persons who have exhibited valuable professional service to the profession, scholarly or academic distinction, distinctive use of the language, and excellence in teaching.
Criteria for the Award
The Distinguished Service Award (DSA) is given to a person (or persons), either volunteer or staff, who have exhibited valuable professional service (within the Council and outside) including scholarly or academic distinction at any level, distinguished use of language, and/or excellence in teaching. These criteria are good measures of acceptable candidates and help to ensure that recipients have a wide range of “service” that they provide to the profession. Nominations should be submitted on an individual basis, not by a group or on behalf of constituent groups (conferences, affiliates, assemblies, committees, etc).
Current NCTE Executive Committee members are not eligible for this award. Recipients of this award are not eligible to receive any other Executive Committee approved awards in the same year, nor in the following year.
The NCTE Distinguished Service Award does not need to be awarded each year. This award should be bestowed only when the committee decides that nominations warrant presentation of the award. This award may be given posthumously.
Award Selection
The DSA Committee will select an award recipient from nominations solicited from the Board of Directors (BOD), affiliate presidents, and liaison officers. The Executive Committee will approve the committee’s selection. The BOD will affirm the final selection.
Distinguished Service Award Previous Recipients
2022 Franki Sibberson, SproutFive, Columbus, OH
2021: Linda Rief, University of New Hampshire’s Summer Literacy Institute and national and international presenter on issues of adolescent literacy
2020 Linda Christensen, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR
2019 Ernest Morrell, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
2018 Keith Gilyard, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
2017 Peter Smagorsinky, The University of Georgia, Athens
2016 Anna J. Small Roseboro, Grand Rapids, MI
2015 Kent D. Williamson, NCTE, Urbana, IL (posthumously)
2014 Sharon H. Chaney, Union University, Hendersonville, TN
2013 Jerome C. Harste, Indiana University, Bloomington
2012 Beverly Ann Chin, University of Montana, Missoula
2011 Erika Lindemann, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2010 Patricia Lambert Stock, Michigan State University, East Lansing
2009 William G. McBride, Colorado State University, Fort Collins
2008 Leila Christenbury, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond
2007 Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL and Sheridan Blau, University of California, Santa Barbara
2006 Evelyn B. Freeman, The Ohio State University, Mansfield Campus
2005 Ben Nelms, University of Florida, Gainesville
2004 George Hillocks, University of Chicago, IL
2003 Kenneth S. Goodman, University of Arizona, Tucson
2002 Richard Lloyd-Jones, University of Iowa, Iowa City (retired)
2001 Pat Graff, La Cueva High School, Albuquerque, NM and Stephen Tchudi, University of Nevada, Reno
2000 Rudine Sims Bishop, The Ohio State University, Columbus
1999 Roseann Dueñas Gonzalez, University of Arizona, Tucson
1998 John Mayher, New York University, NY
1997 Julie M. Jensen, University of Texas at Austin
1996 Sister Rosemary Winkeljohann, Millersville University, PA (retired)
1995 Robert Shafer, Arizona State University, Tempe
1994 Vivian I. Davis, Eastfield College, Mesquite, TX
1993 Yetta Goodman, University of Arizona, Tucson
1992 Richard L. Larson, Herbert H. Lehman College, CUNY, NY
1991 M. Jerry Weiss, Jersey City State College, NJ
1990 James R. Squire, Marlborough, NH
1989 James R. Gray, University of California, Berkeley
1988 Walker Gibson, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1987 Charlotte Huck, The Ohio State University, Columbus
1986 Edward P.J. Corbett, The Ohio State University, Columbus
1985 Charlotte Brooks, Washington, D.C.
1984 Ruth G. Strickland, Indiana University, Bloomington
1983 Imogene Springer, Denver Public Schools, CO
1982 Edmund J. Farrell, University of Texas at Austin
1981 Marjorie Farmer, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
1980 Margaret Early, Syracuse University, NY
1979 James H. Mason, Indiana State University, Terre Haute and Joseph Mersand, Jamaica High School, NY
1978 Priscilla Tyler, University of Missouri, Kansas City
1977 Virginia Reid, Oakland Public Schools, CA
1976 Alfred H. Grommon, Stanford University, CA and William Jenkins, Florida International University, Miami
1975 James E. Miller, University of Chicago, IL
1974 Richard S. Alm, University of Hawaii
1973 Louise Rosenblatt, Rutgers University
1972 Albert H. Marckwardt, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
1971 Alvina T. Burrows, New York University, NY
1970 G. Robert Carlsen, University of Iowa, Iowa City and Dwight Burton, Florida State University, Tallahassee
1969 Harold B. Allen and Muriel Crosby
Hatfield Award Recipients
(previous name of Distinguished Service Award)
1964 John C. Gerber
1962 Lou LaBrant
1960 John J. DeBoer
1960 J.N. Hook
1957 Max John Herzberg
1957 Dora V. Smith
1957 Charles C. Fries
1950 Robert C. Pooley