The Michigan Council of Teachers of English welcomes Carrie Mattern as the president of MCTE for the 2023-2024 school year. Mattern has served as vice president and president-elect in her previous years on MCTE’s Executive Board. In her capacity as MCTE president, Mattern will serve as the voice of the organization and will work closely with the Executive Committee to advocate for teachers and facilitate opportunities for members to learn and connect.
Mattern is a mother of four and an English teacher at Carman-Ainsworth Community Schools in Flint. She is both educator and organizer in her school community working fiercely for diversity, equity, and inclusion for staff and students. She embeds community through her Flint Mural Poems, a collaboration with the Flint Public Art Project that incorporates the 200 murals in Flint as inspiration for her students’ poems. She also leads a volunteer Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team of educators that focuses on building a more inclusive culture at Carman-Ainsworth. She co-sponsors a student-led affiliate group, jedi, that works to promote justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the high school. Attendees will remember the MCTE Annual Conference that Mattern organized last fall, which highlighted the themes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and asked attendees to consider “Where do we go from here? Chaos…” to Community.
During Mattern’s time on the Executive Board, she has reminded the group that MCTE’s Commitments and Action Steps to Move Toward Antiracism should serve as the guiding principle for the work we do. When she applied to enter the president’s cycle in 2021, Mattern said,
I work diligently to decenter my whiteness and my privilege in creating lessons, class syllabi, courses, book studies, and leading a group of colleagues in volunteer diversity, equity, and inclusion work that we bring to staff as professional development. It is this balance of content and equity, fierce allyship, and amplification of marginalized voices that are continuously erased or unheard that I will strive to bring as focus to MCTE.
Mattern’s work with MCTE so far has demonstrated her commitment to advocating for teachers and students. When she stepped into the vice presidency, Mattern said it would be “a service mindset that I will bring to MCTE: how we will help model being better overall humans for one another, for our students, and for our colleagues by continuously seeking truth and interrogating our language and frameworks of education.” We look forward to her continued leadership as she steps into the presidency.