2002 Outstanding ELA Educator Award Winner

Dorothy Watson is the eighth recipient of the NCTE Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts Award. The Outstanding ELA Award recognizes a distinguished national or international educator who has made major contributions to the field of language arts in elementary education.  

Dorothy Watson, professor emerita of curriculum and instruction at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is the 2002 recipient of the Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts Award.  For many years she was a classroom teacher and language arts supervisor in the public school, and she has been involved with in-service teacher education programs around the world.  A commitment to a point of view about how children learn, especially how they learn language, has led her to work with teachers who are applying child-centered, whole language activities within the framework of a process curriculum of the language arts.

In addition to her current recognition as Outstanding Educator in English Language Arts, she has been honored as the 1987 recipient of the International Reading Association's Teacher Educator of the Year Award, been director of NCTE's Commission on Reading, past president of the Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking (CELT), and was the first president of the Whole Language Umbrella (WLU).  In 2003, she was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame.

The Elementary Section Steering Committee celebrated Dorothy Watson's contributions to the English Language Arts during the Elementary Section Get-Together at the NCTE Annual Convention on Thursday, November 21, 2002 in Atlanta Georgia. 

View Dorothy's Get-Together talk and read "Some Lady! A Conversation with Dorothy Watson" by Rudine Sims Bishop which appeared in Language Arts, Volume 80, Number 2 in November, 2002.  (PDF)