An MSU English professor and director of the Writing Center will be representing more than 77,000 English teachers on a national level.
Patricia Lambert Stock was recently elected vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English. The organization includes primary, middle and secondary English teachers, as well as college and university faculty members. The council provides English teachers the chance to learn teaching skills and techniques from others in the field.
Stock, who has been with the Writing Center since its creation in 1992, said her election was very exciting.
“I have worked in the organization for a long time in a lot of roles and it has been a professional home for me,” she said.
While she currently serves as a trustee of the NCTE Research Foundation, Stock has also served as associate executive director with special responsibilities for higher education, chairwoman of the NCTE College Forum and delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies.
Stock began her career as a secondary school English teacher in New York City. She said she turned to NCTE’s conferences, books and journals for continuing her education.
“It is a wonderfully generous organization that, from its outset, has been about access and equity,” Stock said.
In 1992 she worked with colleagues to develop MSU’s Writing Center. For Stock it was one of the most important points in her career.
“When I came to MSU there wasn’t a writing center and it was at the time of conversion from a quarter system to a semester system,” she said.
The conversion led to a change in the university writing requirements. English classes that normally were taken three times a quarter became one class during one semester.
Stock said with the changes came a call for a writing center.
While she will still work with MSU’s Writing Center, she will step down as director. She said she will be focusing on the future of NCTE while in office.
“One of the things that is important to me as I enter the next four years of work is I can’t help but do it by keeping my eye on 2011 - that is going to be the 100th anniversary of the council,” she said. “It has had wonderful tradition and heritage.”
Stock will begin as vice president, and the following year she will succeed as president-elect. During her last term in office, she will serve as president.
Patricia Paulsell, associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters, said Stock’s election is a great distinction.
“She is to be congratulated on being appointed to an organization which has national influence,” she said.
Paulsell said the position Stock has received has brought great honor not only to MSU and the college, but to herself.
Stock brings a wealth of experience as a scholar and a teacher, said David Bloome, a professor of education at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and current NCTE vice president.
“I think it is a great honor and a credit to MSU because it also speaks to the depth and wonderful faculty MSU has brought to its campus,” Bloome said.
