In attendance: Officers Wesley Jacobsen (outgoing President), Joan Ericson (incoming President), Naomi McGloin (outgoing Past President), and Mari Noda (incoming President-Elect); Board members Dan Dewey (incoming), Kazumi Hatasa, Mutsuko Endo Hudson, Janet Ikeda, Noriko Iwasaki (incoming), Yoshiko Mori, Mayumi Oka (incoming), Masumi Reade, J. Paul Warnick, and Eve Zimmerman; Journal editors Tim Vance and Kim Jones; ATJ staff members Kathleen Ajisaka and Susan Schmidt.
The meeting was called to order at 7:00 p.m. by Jacobsen, who expressed his thanks to outgoing Board members Mutsuko Endo Hudson, Junko Mori, and Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura and outgoing Past President Naomi McGloin.
Presidents' messages: Jacobsen noted that the previous year (2006–07) had been an especially eventful one for ATJ, which hosted the highly successful International Conference on Japanese Language Education (ICJLE) in New York in August 2006. The success of the conference was in large part due to the dedicated efforts of the outgoing Board members and President, as they devoted many unpaid hours of their time to the organization of the conference.
ICJLE is a biennial event; the next conference will be held in August 2008 in Korea. No proceedings were published in the US after the 2006 ICJLE, but Nihongo Kyoiku Gakkai plans to publish a volume of summaries later this year.
Another major event for the Japanese language field is the first Advanced Placement (AP) Japanese Language and Culture exam, which will be offered for the first time in May. Assessing the results of the first year of the program will be an important effort for the coming year.
Jacobsen mentioned the letter he had written to the membership about the importance of launching a fundraising campaign with the goal of establishing an endowment that will support ATJ's activities into the future; he asked the Board members to keep this project in mind also and to think about potential donors to a capital campaign.
Jacobsen then passed the "gavel" to Ericson, the incoming President, who welcomed the new Board members and mentioned that she will host the next Board meeting at Colorado College in September.
Ericson added to the topic of the AP Japanese Language and Culture program by noting that as the AP exam takes off there will be more high school students coming into colleges and universities with higher levels of Japanese, and developing new curricula and materials for them will be important. Articulation is a big issue, one that ATJ will need to keep in mind. She mentioned that Colorado College is participating in the AP program and is working with local high schools and that she plans to serve as a reader of the first exams.
One project for the coming year is a special issue of Japanese Language and Literature on pedagogy in the Japanese language classroom. The pedagogy presentations at both ICJLE and the ATJ Seminar held in Boston on March 22 inspired the idea of the special issue, and Ericson will work on recruiting guest editors and issuing a Call for Papers.
She mentioned the 2008 ICJLE in Korea and said she hoped that ATJ would participate officially and that some Board members would be interested in attending the conference.
Minutes: Warnick moved to approve the minutes of the previous meeting (September 30, 2006, Boston) with provision for friendly amendments by email.
Membership report: Membership as of March 1, 2007, stands at 704 (up 30 or so from March 2006). Of these, 438 are regular individual members; 43 are part-time instructors; 11 are retired faculty; 71 are students; and 141 are institutions. There are 25 complimentary memberships, 93 five-year members, 18 ten-year members, and 14 lifetime members. As in previous years, membership should increase as a result of the Seminar and other publicity efforts, to reach a total of between 800 and 900 by the end of the year. Beginning in 2008, membership will be required in order to submit proposals for panels or papers at the ATJ Seminar. Lifetime memberships are also expected to increase slightly as a result of the campaign to support ATJ financially: members have been notified that a substantial portion of the income from new lifetime memberships will be deposited into ATJ's new endowment money-market account.
Financial report: At the end of the calendar (and fiscal) year 2006, ATJ's assets totaled $129,810 in three bank accounts (checking, money-market, and internet deposits from memberships and Seminar registrations processed online). In addition, ATJ had approximately $70,000 on deposit with the University of Colorado: these funds are allocated for staff salaries and benefits; postage and equipment; telephone, fax, and internet; and office maintenance and upkeep for the first six months of 2007. Major sources of income were membership dues ($50,190), conference registrations for ICJLE ($15,066), ads on the website and in the newsletter ($1,900), JSTOR royalties for the journal online archive ($4,119), and grants for the Bridging Project for Study Abroad in Japan ($60,818) and for the ICJLE ($52,130). Major expenses were printing and mailing of the journal ($24,027); printing of the newsletter ($3,553) and membership directory ($1,799); administration of the Bridging Project ($22,612); the ICJLE ($84,244); Board meetings ($7,133); and a deposit to the University of Colorado to cover overhead expenses, salaries and benefits, and postage and supplies ($72,195).
In addition to fundraising for an endowment, the Board suggested other possible income streams, such as sales of goods like T-shirts and of DVDs of conference presentations.
Report on Newsletter and website: As scheduled, the Newsletter has become primarily an online publication; beginning with the February 2007 issue, the default distribution method for individual members is online, via email attachment and/or downloading from the ATJ website. Institutions and those individuals who request paper copies of the Newsletter continue to receive it by mail. There are expected to be substantial savings on printing, and some savings on postage (although these may be minimized by the fact that the smaller number of copies mailed must now go by first class rather than bulk nonprofit mail).
The membership directory will continue to be printed and mailed for the time being; this issue will be revisited at the September Board meeting, together with a discussion of the possibility for making the Directory a file that is searchable online by members, with password protection. The Board agreed that the implications and technical issues of this step should be studied and reported on in September by the Secretariat. Discussion also focused on which sections of the website should be open to all (job listings) and which sections should be password-protected (membership directory, PDF files from recent issues of the journal not yet available on JSTOR, handouts and PowerPoint files from conference presentations, SIG materials).
A redesign of the ATJ website was discussed. It was suggested that a graduate student might be willing to work on this, with candidates for the job solicited via the Newsletter.
Journal report: Coordinating Editor Vance reported that the Fall 2007 issue of the journal Japanese Language and Literature will be a special issue on study abroad, edited by guest editor Ginger Marcus. Several articles have been moved up in to the April 2007 issue as a result, so that they will not have to be delayed longer. Vance explained in answer to a question that the acceptance rate for articles submitted to the journal is about 20% in linguistics and pedagogy; for literature it is higher. In many cases delays in revision by authors causes delays between acceptance and publication.
It was suggested that presenters of outstanding papers at ICJLE be asked to submit their revised papers for publication in JLL. Jacobsen offered to coordinate this effort and asked Board members to send him suggestions of outstanding papers heard at the conference.
Royalties from the JSTOR online archive have become a source of revenue for ATJ. Currently the online archive is available only to people whose institutions are subscribers to JSTOR (and to individual ATJ members under an Individual Access program), with a three-year moving wall: issues from the most recent three years are not available online. The Board discussed whether to change this to a two-year moving wall (as some other language organizations have done) but decided to remain with the three-year wall for now. JSTOR is starting a new program of fee-based access to individual articles for individuals who do not have institutional access and will share the fee with us for articles that are purchased from JLL; this program begins later this year.
The Secretariat was asked to investigate the practices of other language organizations (AATG, AATF, ACTFL, MLA, ACTR, CLTA, etc.) regarding the moving wall and participation in other archive projects and to report at the September board meeting.
Nominating dommittee report: Nominating committee chair Yotsukura reported on the procedure that resulted in the election of a new President-Elect (Noda) and three new Board members (Dewey, Iwasaki, and Oka). She said that a list of the names of individuals who were suggested but in the end were not nominated will be given to the new nominating committee for the 2008 election (Warnick, Hatasa, and Reade).
Seminar committee report: Seminar committee chair Yoshiko Mori reported that the 2007 Seminar, held March 22 (the day before the Board met) was very successful, with more than 170 registrants; the sessions were well attended. Problems encountered by the seminar committee were too few submissions in linguistics and literature and the difficulty in distinguishing between SLA and pedagogy in some submissions. Mori also recommended that for the future, it would be necessary to discuss how best to handle proposals from SIGs (Japanese as a Heritage Language, Professional Development, etc.). In previous years they were handled different ways: sometimes SIGs picked their own presentations, sometimes they had to submit them and have them reviewed.
It was suggested that we ask AAS to schedule the ATJ-designated panel closer to the Thursday Seminar next year, rather than on Sunday morning as was the case in 2007. This would make it easier for more ATJ members to attend.
Old business: 1. Endowment/fundraising efforts. It was suggested that one strategy might be to ask past presidents of ATJ to spearhead and support a fundraising campaign. Another idea was to find a corporation or foundation that would make a large initial donation or that would endow a chair in Japanese language (which could move from one institution to another).
2. Japanese National Honor Society (college level). The Board agreed to move ahead on this project. The first step will be to survey the membership by email to determine interest in JNHS. The results of the survey will be reported to the Board, and teachers from NCJLT who have experience with JNHS (Motoko Tabuse, Shingo Satsutani, Masumi Reade) will be asked for advice on setting up the program.
New business: 1. New nominating and seminar committees. The Seminar Committee for 2008 will include Hatasa, Reade, and Warnick, as well as other Board members who wish to participate. All Board members will be asked to review proposals. The Nominating Committee will include outgoing Board and Executive members Ikeda, Jacobsen, Mori, and Zimmerman.
2. Fall 2007 Board meeting. The fall Board meeting will be hosted by Ericson at Colorado College\Colorado Springs, on the third or fourth Saturday of September. The Secretariat will poll the members of the ATJ and NCJLT Boards to determine the best date for most members. (The Fall meeting is a joint meeting of the ATJ and NCJLT boards, sponsored and partially funded by the Alliance of Associations of Teachers of Japanese.)
3. Request from graduate student at Monterey Institute for International Studies for financial information. Vera Jones, a student from MIIS, has asked for copies of ATJ's tax returns, budgets, and other financial information for a research paper on budget analysis of a nonprofit organization. It was decided that a short proposal and letter of support from the student's professor should be requested before information is shared.
Respectfully submitted,
Susan Schmidt