Greetings HEISers!

We hope this finds you well and that your professional life is blossoming. For those of you looking at the summer coming up, we hope you find it productive, relaxing, invigorating, enjoyable, rewarding, or a suitable combination thereof.

It was great to see so many of you in Toronto this past March. The conference was full of great ideas and presentations, even if the hike between the two parts of the convention center made it a more cardiovascular experience than usual. Our Academic Session explored the challenges NNESTs face in higher education and how we can best advocate for them. Our InterSection with ITAIS discussed a number of approaches to catering to the specific needs of graduate students and international teaching assistants. Both of these sessions were well received and the dialogue on these important issues was moved forward.

Of course, HEIS selected dozens of presentations for this year's convention on a wide variety of topics of interest to our members in the higher education sphere, and we have received positive feedback on many of them. We wish to thank all of our presenters as well as those who submitted proposals that we unfortunately could not include in this year's program.

For those of you who were not able to make it to Toronto this year, we hope that you will be able to join us next year in Baltimore. The deadline for proposals will have passed by the time this newsletter goes out, but I hope that many of you submitted proposals. Your idea or approach to a question in the classroom or with your colleagues may be something that many others would like to know about. Please consider sharing and helping our profession continue to develop. Remember, there is support available to help you to attend TESOL. See www.tesol.org/about-tesol/tesol-awards-grants/convention-travel-grants-scholarships for details.

We would like to encourage all our members from near and far to come to our 50th Anniversary Convention in Baltimore. We would like to show our support to the city and its efforts to heal. As an international organization we can offer our good will and participate in the effort to promote understanding and progress.

Our new social media coordinator, Sarah Springsteen, is working to keep us all in touch via social media. We have a new Twitter account at @TESOLHEIS, so please follow to keep up with the latest higher ed news for ESL concerns. We are also transitioning the TESOL HEIS Facebook page. We hope to have more news on that soon.

The Listserv, of course, is still up and running. Feel free to share your thoughts or pose questions for the community by sending an email to HEIS@community.tesol.org.

We are proud to say that many members are generous with their time and ideas and give their own perspectives to help with all of the challenges we face in our professional careers.

Best wishes to you all for the year ahead.

Leo Schmitt and Abby Franchitti

Co-chairs

TESOL Higher Education Interest Section

Leo Schmitt teaches Linguistics and Anthropology at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College, ESL Teacher Education at CUNY Lehman, and ESL at Columbia University. He is also working on his Linguistics dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Abby Franchitti is the Director of Curriculum and Assessment for the English Language Program at Kansas State University. She also is in charge of the MA TEF/SL practicum for adult learners at Kansas State.