Our Legacy

As we celebrate our anniversary, we would never be able to celebrate it without proudly citing the exciting history that one of our founding members Ron Eckard chronicled in the first Kentucky TESOL Newsletter, Volume 1, No1, Aug. 1979, not to mention including a picture of our founding members taken with Dr. James Alatis, one of the founders of the TESOL organization. Without their dedication, initiative, and TESOL International’s consistent leadership support, we might not be celebrating our legacy and achievements today.

We Are Connected

In the past 40 years, our organization’s professional work has focused on teachers and students in our field. We have worked diligently and innovatively to provide high quality and contemporary professional development services to Kentucky TESOL educators. In 1979, when the organization was started with 36 charter members, we hosted both spring and fall conferences. Because of the organization development and its new responsibilities, in 2003, the Board turned the Spring conference into a half-day professional development (PD) program/workshop with a spring board meeting. At this writing, we have kept the tradition of spring and fall board meetings and a fall annual conference. Since 2004, the Board has begun providing PD credit to conference participants and organizing annual conferences around public school teaching schedules such as on Friday and Saturday so that more public school teachers and educators are able to participate and earn the PD credit.

To keep members well connected, KYTESOL has been an affiliate of TESOL international for 40 years and a council member of Southeast Regional TESOL (SETESOL) since 1986 when we first posted SETESOL Conference information in our KY TESOL Newsletter. During our history, we have collaborated with other TESOL councils such as Midwest TESOL and OKI TESOL, with which we maintained our involvement until 2008. Finally, because of the vast area represented and the emphasis of our organizational mission, we have focused and continued our active membership and contribution to TESOL International and SETESOL. Our commitment to SETESOL is evidenced in the successful hosting of the two SETESOL Regional Conferences. In 2007, Ms. Daniele Novak and Ms. Nicole Neuhard co-chaired the 2007 SETESOL Conference in Louisville, KY, and in 2016, Dr. Latricia Trites and Dr. Saihua Xia co-chaired the 2016 SETESOL Conference in Louisville, KY. Approximately 500-600 TESOL professionals from the region and neighboring states participated in the conferences.

Our annual conferences would not be successful without the partnership of the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). KDE became a partnership with KYTESOL in the Spring of 2004. This partnership was for the purpose of jointly hosting the annual conference for KYTESOL teachers and professionals, as well as offering a long-term collaboration for the visions and goals of professional development. Due to this collaboration, a separate PD Committee on the Board was established and continues to function. Since 2004, we have invited the Title III Coordinator of KDE to serve as an ex-officio member to our Board. Denise Baily, Shelda Hale, and Gary Martin have all served in this capacity, providing generous funding and professional service to the organization.

We are Dedicated

The following is a list of dedicated leaders who have committed their time and dedication to volunteer and successfully maintain our tradition of an annual conference without interruption from 1979 to 2019, hosting either one or two annual conferences. Several of the presidents have served two terms; two of them, Angie Reimer and Carrie Cook, have even volunteered three terms to faithfully serve our members and professionals. Without this list of members’ commitment and leadership, joined by all the year-by-year board members’ dedication, our organization would not be here to celebrate the 40^th anniversary.

Teachers and Students Are the Center of Our Service

In 2002, to support teachers to attend conferences, the KYTESOL Professional Development Award was established to support KYTESOL members with partial funding of expenses to attend state, regional, or international conferences. In 2018, to recognize teachers’ professional excellence at our annual conference, we established the KYTESOL Teacher of the Year Award. Mrs. Ginny Garner was recognized as our 2019 KYTESOL Teacher of the Year. Mrs. Garner is an ESL/Bilingual teacher at Mayfield Elementary School in Mayfield, KY. Her school has over 200 K-4 ELLs. Her featured Teacher of the Year presentation at the conference was fully packed with enthusiastic participants.

To encourage teachers’ innovations in serving students, in 2002, we established an ESL (Project) Recognition Award to the person with the most innovative lesson, project, and teaching techniques. This name was used until 2008. Later we changed that award into Student Scholarship Program to support students’ success. The program has been well managed by our lifetime Board member, Angie Reimer. Since 2008, KYTESOL has continued to offer annual scholarships through the program to ELL students who are graduating from a Kentucky high school and have been accepted into a two- or four-year post-secondary institution in Kentucky. To protect the scholarship funds and guarantee the funding yearly, we have implemented two strategies: Initially, we held auctions at our conferences and accepted donations, and currently, we designate $5 dollars from each conference registration to the scholarship fund. Here is our 2019 Scholarship Recipient, Tram Ngoc Bao Nguyen, who spent the first 16 years of her life in Vietnam. She studied her first year at the ESL Newcomer Academy and then graduated from Fairdale High School in Louisville, KY. She is now studying at the University of Louisville.

Our annual conference wouldn’t be successful without the dedicated and full participation of the TESOL Program at Murray State University (MSU). Notably, over the last 10 years, the program faculty have made recognizable efforts to serve the board and encourage TESOL students to attend, volunteer, and present at the conference. Each year, almost half of the presentations, workshops, and poster sessions are given by MSU faculty and students. This effort has promoted participation from faculty and students at other institutions of higher education, including the University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, Spalding, Asbury, and Western Kentucky.

While we place teachers and students at the center of our service, one distinctive strand repeated with received popularity at the concerns of the conference newcomers in the last 10 years.

Due to the unique situation of Kentucky, we receive many refugee ELLs every year from various countries around the world. Our KYTESOL annual conferences have invited speakers and continued to hold talks, presentations, workshops, and exhibits on this strand to address English learning needs. For example, during the 2016 SETESOL regional conference, we organized ESL Newcomer Academy Tours in addition to the workshops given by Ms. Gwen Snow, principal of the ESL Newcomer Academy, and her teaching staff during our Dream Day event. This ticketed event to the Academy was sold out very quickly and was very well received. In 2019, Dr. Elizabeth Patton and Ms. Lisa Cox, serving as conference organizers, moved the conference location to the ESL Newcomer Academy in Louisville, providing teachers with an authentic and meaningful venue. Conference participants were happy with the opportunity to see such a positive learning atmosphere for English language learners.

Since professional development is critical to our organization, we have dedicated our service to providing quality training and support to our members. For example, we have invited the Southern Poverty Law Center, World-class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA), and Understanding Language to give presentations and training. We have consistently invited national and internationally renowned scholars and TESOL professionals to present as keynotes, plenary speakers, and quality workshops. In addition, locally renowned educators and authors have also been invited to provide quality workshops and contextualized training for our members. For the first time in KYTESOL history, a young immigrant college student named Mehwish Zamikhan was invited to give a keynote address about her refugee life at the 2019 conference. Mehwish, one of the nine young authors, contributed her story to the book entitled No Single Sparrow Makes a Summer that documents the stories of people and communities in Louisville through the Louisville Story Program.

Professional development services provided by KYTESOL has evolved from teacher perspectives such as specific classroom issues/strategies/techniques to teacher-and-learner perspectives. We not only care about how learners learn with well-trained, qualified, and effective teachers but also care about who the learners are and whom they would like to be under the facilitation of our teachers! We have put teachers and learners at the forefront while we serve the KYTESOL professional circle faithfully and innovatively.

Our KYTESOL organization has worked diligently to serve our members over the past 40 years. We welcome more involvement and dedication from our members and other ESL teaching professionals. Let’s continue our tradition and collaborate with greater dedication and innovation, serving our teachers and students to new heights as we face challenges of globalization, virtual learning, edutainment, and more during this digital English language teaching and learning age.

Dr. Saihua Xia, an Associate Professor in the TESOL Programs at Murray State University, is the current PD Liaison to TESOL International and SETESOL for KYTESOL Board. She has been serving on the Board in various leadership roles since 2010. She currently also serves on the TESOL International PDPC.

Dr. Latricia Trites is Professor of TESOL and English and Director of the TESOL Programs at Murray State University. She has been an active member of TESOL and KYTESOL for over two decades, serving KYTESOL as an at large member, publications liaison, president, TESOL Liaison, and is currently treasurer.