NCTE Organizational History
Since 1911, The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has been an advocate for literacy education and curriculum standards and a forum for educators to share learning and classroom strategies. NCTE supports educators and their students at all levels of education and furthers research and scholarship in the profession. More information can be found on NCTE’s homepage.
The National Council of Teachers of English was formed primarily out of protest against overly-specific college entrance requirements and the effects they were having on high school English education.
The English Round Table of the Secondary Division of the National Education Association appointed a committee lead by James F. Hosic to survey college entrance exam requirements. It was a finding of this committee that there was a “need of a permanent, nation-wide organization of teachers of English” (taken from A Long Way Together: A Personal View of NCTE’s First Sixty-Seven Years by J.N. Hook).
The organizational meeting was held December 1 and 2, 1911, in Chicago, Illinois. Hosic sent out a call to attend this meeting to over four hundred educators around the country. Approximately 65 people attended the organizational meeting, and on December 2, 1911, at the Great Northern Hotel in Chicago, 35 people signed the roster of charter members of the National Council of Teachers of English.
History of the NCTE Archives
The NCTE Archives documents the history of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the profession of teaching literature and language arts at the elementary, middle, secondary, and college levels.
In 1979, NCTE made its first deposit to the University Archives, which consisted of 20 record series, amounting to 27.5 cubic feet. Over the next 27 years, the Archives received an additional 12 series, amounting to a further 28.2 cubic feet. Meanwhile, a substantial body of inactive records grew in the offices and storage areas of NCTE headquarters.
In anticipation of the 2011 NCTE Centennial, NCTE’s Task Force on Council History and 2011 began work in 2004 on examining the scope and extent of the inactive records and considering how best to bring the breadth of NCTE’s documentary heritage under administrative, intellectual, and preservation control.
Following an extensive inventory of over 300 boxes by NCTE staff, the task force developed a plan to transfer those materials to the University Archives. In 2007, NCTE entered into an agreement with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to have its noncurrent records of long-term value processed and housed at the University Archives.
Today, the University Archives has over [200] cubic feet of NCTE materials. These records, dating from the organization’s founding in 1911 to the present, document the history of the governance and activities of NCTE as well as its affiliates, conferences, and research foundation.
The NCTE Archives is open to public use. Please contact the University of Illinois Archives for additional assistance in searching and using the archives. You can email the Archives at nctearchives@illinois.edu.
For more detailed information about the materials in the archives, please see the holdings page.
