Hello ITA-ISers!

It was wonderful to see so many of you at the recent TESOL Convention in Chicago and to have the opportunity to hear about the wonderful work being done on the different campuses! I look forward to working with each of you as we navigate through the new proposal and strand changes that are being implemented this year. I’m confident that we will continue to contribute to the field as well as being an integral and vital component of the TESOL community.

As you may know, the call for proposal reviewers and TESOL 2019 call for proposals went out in early June. I do hope that all of you have applied to be reviewers and are preparing to submit multiple proposals for the 2019 TESOL Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, USA! If you have any questions about the process, please do not hesitate to contact any of us on the leadership team. Please note that the deadline for 2019 TESOL Convention proposal submission is Monday, 2 July 2018. For those of you who are interested in submitting a proposal to the TESOL 2019 Electronic Village, the call for proposals should be sent out towards the end of August and I’ll be sure to send out a reminder.

I consider myself so fortunate to be a member of our dynamic and close-knit ITA developers community! Let’s continue the wonderful conversations that began in Chicago and support each other through our network, given that so many of us are in small programs. With that in mind, we recently had the first of several webinars planned for this year:

Stacy Suhadolc, Dingding Jia, and Michael Amory (Penn State University)
From Play to ITA: Enhancing Your Role-Play Activities
Wed, 27 June 2018

This was advertised through our original and community ITAIS list (please contact me if you are not receiving our emails) and for those of you who were unable to join us, I will send out a link to the recording soon. If anyone has a presentation that they would like to share through a webinar with the ITA professional community, please let me know as soon as possible!

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the many significant contributions of the past ITAIS leadership team, but most especially Past-Chair Stephen Looney for his commitment and persistence to have us successfully remain an interest section! In addition, I’d especially like to thank Chair-Elect Mo Burke for her immense support; Diane Cotsonas for her tireless work with the ITAIS website and coordinating our original email list; and Laura Murphy for being willing to continue the amazing work as the ITAIS newsletter editor as she mentors Editor-Elect Maike Buckingham - welcome! A special shout-out to Ken Hyde for organizing our delicious dinner at the ITAIS Social and to Maria Mendoza for coordinating a great InterSection session.

I hope you will consider a leadership role in the ITAIS next year! If interested, please contact Stephen, who is responsible for recruiting new members to the leadership team.

I hope you’re having a wonderful and relaxing summer!

Derina Samuel

ITAIS Chair