The AATSP: A Snapshot of the Present and a Vision for the Future

On December 29, 1917 some 130 individuals gathered at the College of the City of New York for the first annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish. A terrible blizzard was underway in New York City that day and many attendees arrived late. The early founders of the organization had planned well and even with the difficult weather conditions, the meeting went on as scheduled and four papers were presented. In his history of the first seventy-five years of the AATSP, Richard B. Klein remarked, "It is worthwhile noting that the AATS was born at a difficult time of year, under egregious weather conditions, and at the height of World War I" (Klein 1992: 1037).

Despite this difficult and inauspicious beginning, the AATS moved forward with its "devotion to things Hispanic" (Klein 1992: 1037) and its mission "to enhance the place of Spanish in the curriculum of the entire country" (Klein 1992: 1040). Membership began to increase, the size of the annual meeting expanded, and new member services were initiated. However, the next major development for the organization did not occur until December 1944 when Portuguese faculty members were admitted as members and the name of the organization became the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP).

These beginning years of the AATSP can be viewed as a metaphor for the hundred-year history of the organization as well as inspiration for the future. From its beginnings, through the middle years of the twentieth-century, and into the new millennium, the AATSP faced financial downturns, grim political situations, and challenging circumstances for the teaching of world languages. Because of the vision and determination of the membership and leadership, the AATSP expanded and became a model for other language-specific organizations.

The present-day AATSP owes much of its success to the period of the late 1950s through the 1990s when the AATSP underwent tremendous growth and added programs and activities. After a financial downturn and decline in membership in the early years of the twenty-first century, the AATSP today is again financially stable, has a growing membership base topping 10,000, and has an increasing number of successful programs and publications.

The following overview of the various programs and publications of the AATSP provides a snapshot of the organization in its centennial year and offers suggestions for continued progress.

Membership and Member Benefits

The demographic changes that occurred in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s caused a major shift in the education system and society as a whole by replacing policies involving uniformity and "one size fits all" with policies reflecting individualization and "the customer is always right" (Spinelli 2004). Professional organizations that continued with a one-size-fits-all approach to their programming began to face declining membership. This latter trend was well documented in Sarah L. Sladek's book The End of Membership as We Know It (2011) in which the author provided recommendations for organizations to maintain or improve membership numbers in a new reality.

In order to attract new and retain current members, the AATSP has focused on increasing the number of member benefits without increasing dues and offering a greater variety of programs to appeal to more individuals. The AATSP currently offers a wide selection of professional development opportunities including the annual conference, webinars, scholarships and travel stipends for study abroad, as well as numerous events at the chapter level. Over the last decade the AATSP has created new publications in both print and digital format and improved the quality of the existing publications. The number of AATSP programs has increased and now includes National Portuguese Examinations, National Spanish Examinations, Online Classroom Resources, Phi Lambda Beta, Poster Contest, Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica, and the Sociedad Hispánica de Amistad.

Notwithstanding the expansion in the number of programs and publications, the AATSP still faces two membership challenges: the need to continually attract new members and the need to establish a membership that is more or less equally divided between those at the K–12 level and those at...