History
The Christian Association of World Languages was founded to provide a platform for educators to exchange new ideas and scholarship among supportive colleagues, who all share the common goal of teaching and advancing the study of world languages from a Christian perspective. Since the start, the organization has significantly evolved, with the annual conference continuing to play a key role in bringing this community of scholars closer together.
How it all began
The early days of CAWL are closely related to the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU). Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, CCCU set out to advance the cause of Christ-centered higher education by sponsoring workshops at various conferences, aiming to bring a Christian perspective into numerous disciplines.
(picture from the 30th anniversary at Azusa Pacific University)
A small group of people headed by Karen Longman thought this should also happen in the teaching of Foreign Languages and by 1990, Earl Stevick taught a first CCCU sponsored workshop about how to integrate Faith into Foreign Language Methodology at Palm Beach Atlantic University. This workshop marks the beginning of our organization’s yearly conferences. About 20 people attended, among them Barbara Carvill and Claude-Marie Baldwin, who are seen by many as the founding mothers of our organization.
The workshop attendees found the exchange of ideas with likeminded scholars refreshing as well as inspiring and thus decided to meet again the next year at Wheaton College. To this day, our annual conferences rotate geographically, with members’ home institutions taking turns in hosting. At Wheaton, more than 20 papers were presented over the course of two days in April 1991. Clearly, the possibility of presenting papers based on a Christian perspective to teaching foreign languages had struck a nerve. Nevertheless, it took three more years until the North American Christian Foreign Language Association (NACFLA) was officially born in 1994 at Lee College under the leadership of Claude-Marie Baldwin and Patricia Boehne. You will find the original proposed constitution and by-laws here.
Conference proceedings started to get circulated and if you are interested in finding out more about the papers presented, click here.
In the years from 1991-1999 the conference proceedings were circulated in an informal “conference proceedings” newsletter. However, when David Smith presented for the first time at NACFLA, he immediately proposed the idea of a refereed journal. It took some time to put this idea into reality, but by 2000 the organization had 150 members and the first volume of JCFL appeared under the editorship of Phyllis Mitchell at Wheaton College. Since then, the journal has considerably evolved, but it is still shared with members at the annual conference.
But not only the journal developed over the course of time, our organization did, too. Eventually, the North American Christian Foreign Language Association turned into what we now know as CAWL, the Christian Association of World Languages and celebrated its 30th conference at Azusa University in 2020 (pictured above).
Yet what always remained constant over the years was the impact the organization had on its community of scholars in their professional as well as personal lives.