Collaboration Across Borders 2026: A Fukuoka JALT – Busan-Gyeongsang-Daegu KOTESOL Joint Symposium

Saturday Sep 12, 2026, 9:00 AM → 6:00 PM Asia/Tokyo

9:00 AM → 6:00 PM Room 1: Plenaries: Plenary Sessions

Conveners: Gabriela Villafradez (KOTESOL), KC Washington (BusanGD KOTESOL), Trevor Holster (Kyushu High-school)

10:00 AM Plenary Session 1

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Speaker: Sunao Fukunaga (Kyushu Institute of Technology)

4:40 PM Plenary Session

Speaker: Nathanael Rudolph (Kindai University (近畿大学))

11:10 AM → 4:50 PM Room 3: Student Showcase: Student Showcase

Conveners: Gabriela Villafradez (KOTESOL), Trevor Holster (Kyushu High-school)

11:50 AM Student Showcase 1

12:30 PM Student Showcase 2

2:00 PM Student Showcase 3

2:40 PM Student Showcase 4

3:20 PM Student Showcase 5

4:00 PM Student Showcase 6

11:10 AM → 4:50 PM Room 1: JALT

11:10 AM Concurrent 1: JALT Fukuoka

11:50 AM Concurrent 2: JALT Fukuoka

12:30 PM Concurrent 3: JALT Fukuoka

2:00 PM Concurrent 4: JALT Fukuoka

2:40 PM Concurrent 5: JALT Fukuoka

3:20 PM Concurrent 6: JALT Fukuoka

4:00 PM Concurrent 7: JALT Fukuoka

11:10 AM → 4:50 PM Room 2: KOTESOL: KOTESOL

Conveners: Gabriela Villafradez (KOTESOL), KC Washington (BusanGD KOTESOL)

11:10 AM Concurrent 1: BGD KOTESOL

Speaker: Bryan Meadows (Yongsan International School of Seoul)

11:50 AM Thibault: Shades of Cultural Adjustment: From Pink to 3-D

As expats in a foreign country, how can we adapt to a new environment? How can we make sense of unfamiliar social codes, connect with others, and thrive? As educators, how can we connect better with students from different cultural backgrounds and bridge our cultural differences?

EFL teachers in Korea and Japan have all faced these questions. This presentation is designed to offer some answers, as well as avenues of reflection and action to help expatriate educators find their footing, learn, and blossom in a foreign cultural environment. By helping them deepen their own cross-cultural awareness, we can help develop insight that can better support and guide students preparing to travel or study
abroad.

Through a witty and sensitive exploration of the ways culture shapes thoughts, communication, and actions, the presentation will help teachers navigate cultural differences, explore visible and hidden layers of culture, examine the four stages of cultural adjustment, and reflect on where they and their students may be in the process. The
workshop also addresses how to identify and challenge stereotypes, prejudice, and unconscious bias, which are critical skills for educators shaping intercultural attitudes in the classroom.

Dr. Natalie Thibault is an assistant professor at Wonkwang University in Iksan, South Korea. She is an experienced English as a second language (ESL) instructor, having taught in Asia for nearly two decades. In addition to her teaching career, she has been focusing her qualitative research efforts on rapport-building between students and professors, internationalization of Korean higher education, and international student experiences. Dr. Thibault is involved with several international publications dedicated to qualitative and education-related research, including The Qualitative Report, for which she is a Senior Editor.

Speaker: Natalie Thibault (Wonkwang University)

Natalie Thibault

12:30 PM Svoboda: The Existential ELT Classroom: Yalom’s Givens and the Pedagogy of Care

This workshop explores how Irvin Yalom’s four existential givens—mortality, freedom, isolation, and meaning—can serve as powerful lenses for expanding empathy within ELT. We examine how these profound human themes can recalibrate our pedagogical stance and collegial relations, foregrounding an active ethic of care and mutual regard. By re-contextualising these givens for the EFL classroom, we demonstrate how an empathetic presence can transform the climate for learner interaction. Rather than prescribing rigid techniques, this session cultivates a shared vocabulary: empathy as a foundational orientation rather than an ornament, and connection as a deliberate practice. Participants will be equipped to imagine context-sensitive applications that honor their unique local constraints. Attendees will leave with conceptual touchstones for designing humane, language-rich spaces where existential awareness bridges isolation, fostering a deeply empathetic and resonant classroom experience.

Daniel Svoboda is an Assistant Professor of Korean-English Translation at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and a professional translator since 2009. He has worked with major Korean corporations and institutions, and is a contributing author to educational publications for the King Sejong Institute and the International Korean Education. He is the co-author of Copywriting in English (2025), Korea's leading guide to English marketing copy.

Speaker: Daniel Svoboda (KOTESOL - Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

Daniel Svoboda

2:00 PM Hollander, Slagle & Washington: Cultural Context in the Classroom

Accessing a culture that you don’t have the context for is fraught with challenges that range from minor slip-ups to major
faux pas. But it can also give opportunities to grow understanding, inspiration, and consideration for others. As educators,
building the context around culture is crucial to allow students to explore subjects safely and gain perspectives that
challenge them.

In this panel, we will discuss experiences in exploring cultural context in the classroom and how
educators can best bring those experiences into practice. In doing so, we can better support students in their context so
they can feel encouraged and included in their own education.

Panel Members

Maiah Hollander is an American (California and Washington) educator who broke out of corporate life to become an EFL teacher and explore the world. Maiah has been teaching internationally for four years, earning her master’s in communication and education with a focus on media literacy and AI technologies in the classroom. Fresh from two years of teaching English in Spain public schools, Maiah made her way to Korea in August 2025 as part of the government-sponsored EPIK program. She was invited to take on the role of the KOREA TESOL 2026 International Conference Publicity director due to her background in journalism and will reprise this role in 2027, focusing on developing and expanding brand awareness and partner collaborations. Looking ahead, Maiah’s next academic project will be obtaining a PhD in Japan to further expand on the topics and experiences she has gained through her educational research and international experiences.
maiah.hollander@gmail.com

Since 2013, Sarah Slagle has been attending, volunteering, and presenting at KOTESOL conferences and chapter meetings. Meeting fellow educators and discussing professional challenges is her favorite aspect of being in the KOTESOL community. Having spent more than 10 years teaching at Korean universities, she has helped many students reach their dreams of becoming more confident and proficient in using English. Her current endeavor is opening a language education company, with English and Korean language programming for adults in the greater Busan area. She may be contacted at sarah.slagle@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.

KC Washington is a Foreign Language Lecturer at Gyeongsang National University, novelist, travel blogger, and freelance independent historian. She has an Associate of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia, a Bachelor of Arts in English from Brooklyn College, and a Master of Arts in Bilingual Education/ESL and Reading from the University of Texas Permian Basin.
KC has written articles on feminism, African American history and culture, and travel. She is currently a contributing writer for BlackPast.org, Medium.com, The English Connection, and the KOTESOL Journal.
She has been the vice president of the Busan-Gyeongnam KOTESOL chapter since 2022. In 2025, she also assumed the role of Director of Communications.

kcwashingtonesl@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/view/kcwashingtonteachingportfolio

Speakers: KC Washington (BusanGD KOTESOL), Maiah Hollander (KOTESOL), Sarah Slagle

2:40 PM Kester: Peace Education in Challenging Times (Hybrid)

Peace education faces profound challenges amid accelerating geopolitical instability, economic inequality, environmental crises, and growing critiques of its intellectual foundations. These developments raise urgent questions about the aims, justifications, epistemologies, and methodologies of the field. This presentation examines these challenges through emerging scholarship on affective, critical, decolonial, and posthumanist approaches to peace and peace education. It explores the contributions and limitations of each perspective and their potential to advance more pluralistic forms of peacebuilding education. Affective approaches foreground the emotional and relational dimensions of peace; critical approaches emphasize political inquiry, social critique, and activism; decolonial perspectives challenge enduring structures of coloniality and modernity; and posthumanist perspectives expose the limits of anthropocentric thinking. In response, the presentation proposes a postcritical approach to peace education that integrates these traditions and moves beyond exclusively rational orientations to peacebuilding. It concludes by drawing on empirical studies from China/Taiwan, Cyprus, Korea, Pakistan, and Somalia/Somaliland.

Kevin Kester is Associate Professor of Comparative International Education and Peace/Development Studies and Director of the Education, Conflict and Peace Lab at Seoul National University. His research engages the sociology and politics of education with an emphasis on comparative education, education and conflict, peace education, higher education, and global citizenship education. He is author of the International Handbook on Peace Education (Routledge, 2026), Conflict, Peace and Teaching in Higher Education: Postcritical Praxis in a World of Conflict (Routledge, 2026), A Modern Guide to Education in East Asia: Global and Local Intersections (Edward Elgar, 2026), Common Curriculum Guide for Peace Education in Northeast Asia (UNESCO-APCEIU, 2023), and The United Nations and Higher Education: Peacebuilding, Social Justice, and Global Cooperation for the 21st Century (Emerald, 2020), among many other books and journal articles. He is Editor of the Asia Pacific Education Review, Executive Editor of Teaching in Higher Education, and Associate Editor of Journal of International Cooperation in Education. He is the recipient of the 2024 Noam Chomsky Shining Star Research Award and the 2022 Unju Prize for Research Excellence. Originally from Kentucky, he was commissioned as a Kentucky Colonel by the Governor of Kentucky in 2020.

Speaker: Kevin Kester (Seoul National University)

Kevin Kester

3:20 PM Ford: Creative Collaboration Across Borders Through Video Haiku

The Reel Voices Language Learning Film Festival is an annual online event in which language learners from Japan, Korea, and all over the world are invited to create short films, and come together virtually to watch, discuss, and celebrate one another’s work. As part of this event, The Reel Challenge, a short-video contest for first-time filmmakers, is held with a special theme. This year's theme is "Video Haiku." Drawing on research in haiku pedagogy (Iida, 2010) and digital multimodal composition (Liang and Lim, 2021), the presenter will share examples of Video Haiku, outline steps for making them, and provide teaching materials, including a storyboard for writing. Afterward, teachers in Japan and Korea will be able to try this activity with their students, encourage their students to enter their films in the Reel Voices Film Festival, and build meaningful cross-border connections through authentic intercultural communication and creative collaboration.
References:

Iida, A. (2010). Developing voice by composing haiku: A social-expressivist approach for teaching haiku writing in EFL contexts. English Teaching Forum, 48(1), 28–34. https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/10-48-1-e.pdf

Liang, W. J., & Lim, F. V. (2021). A pedagogical framework for digital multimodal composing in the English Language classroom. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 15(4), 306–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2020.1800709

Speaker: Ashley Ford (Nagoya City University)

Ashley Ford

Ashley Ford - Firefly_An image that expressing the tradition of haiku poem and filmmaking

4:00 PM Kudaibergenov: Who Gets to Teach? Identity, Power, and Legitimacy in Korean ELT

Who gets to teach English in South Korea, and what determines who is viewed as a legitimate English teacher? This presentation synthesizes findings from a program of research on transnational English teachers in Korean ELT. It examines how teachers negotiate professional identity and legitimacy within a system shaped by native-speaker ideologies, racialized hiring practices, and institutional and regulatory constraints. Drawing on multiple case studies of practicing and pre-service teachers, the findings show that legitimacy is shaped not only by qualifications and teaching ability but also by nationality, race, legal status, and institutional policies. Participants' narratives illustrate how structural inequalities influence access to employment, professional recognition, and career development while requiring teachers to negotiate tensions between their identities and dominant expectations of who counts as a "legitimate" English teacher. The presentation argues for more equitable hiring practices, inclusive teacher education, and policy reforms that recognize the diverse expertise of English teachers across national and linguistic boundaries.

Dr. Meerbek Kudaibergenov serves as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Language Education & Research, Seoul National University of Science & Technology (SeoulTech), South Korea. With a keen focus on Eastern and Central Asian contexts, his research explores various dimensions of ELT, student and teacher identity, higher education, and country image. Apart from SeoulTech, he also serves the Journal of International Students as a Senior Editor. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7717-9473

Speaker: Dr Meerbek Kudaibergenov (Seoul National University of Science and Technology)