The Language Teacher
December 2000
Toward a Participatory Democracy: Bridging JALT's Communication Gap
James J. Scott
Kagoshima JALT
In "The Way Ahead and the Menu Option: Tangential to the plot?" Charles Jannuzi (2000) proposes a menu plan for JALT membership fees as "a means by which the organization could control its own reforms while receiving a direct line of information on how it was meeting members' wants and needs" (p. 3). I suggest that the problem is not limited to bottom-up communication regarding the wants and needs of JALT members (important as such communication undoubtedly is). Rather, we need to drastically improve two-way communication between our national leadership and our rank-and-file members regarding all of those issues where the decisions that JALT makes are likely to have a significant impact on the organization's future.
Let's start with top-down communication. In the four years since I have taken a more or less active interest in what happens at the national level, JALT has increased its membership fees by over 40%, altered the composition of its Executive Board, and revised its constitution and bylaws in order to gain official recognition from the Japanese government as a non-profit organization (NPO). Yet, despite the importance of these measures, in each instance JALT decided on a course of action before most of our rank-and-file members were even aware that the issue in question was being discussed.
Each of the above measures may have been desirable -- perhaps even necessary. However, when an organization takes such measures without first informing its members regarding the issues involved, that organization risks alienating the very people without whose support it cannot hope to prosper. This is a risk that JALT should not be willing to take. JALT's leadership can deal with this problem by making greater use of a forum that already exists -- the "Opinions and Perspectives" column in The Language Teacher. When there is a clear consensus at the national level (i.e., among Executive Board members) regarding a different measure, one individual could be delegated to write a column explaining what needs to be done and why (this approach might have been useful in explaining to our members JALT's decision to seek official recognition as an NPO). When opinion at the national level is divided, each of the opposing camps could delegate an individual to prepare a column presenting its views. The two columns could then appear back-to-back in the same issue of TLT.
Let us now turn to bottom-up communication. Assuming that both sides of an issue have been presented to our members, how can JALT's leadership find out what our members think? One way would be to invite members to respond via email and snail-mail addresses appended to the column. Another would be to conduct a telephone survey.
Admittedly, JALT lacks the expertise needed to conduct a truly scientific survey, but for our purposes, we don't need too high a degree of accuracy. All we need is a survey sufficiently accurate so as to give us a rough idea of how our members feel. Is there a consensus in either direction regarding a given issue? Or, is opinion more or less evenly divided?
The logistics of conducting such a survey should not pose any insurmountable problems. The leaders of the opposing sides could agree upon a mutually acceptable list of questions. JALT's database could be used to randomly select the names of, say, 300 members. Each chapter president could be given the list of questions, together with the names of those to be surveyed selected from his or her chapter (of course in larger chapters, the president could ask other officers to assist calling members). After the survey has been completed, the results could be tabulated by JALT's central office and published in the JENL and TLT. This would give our national leadership and our rank-and-file members a chance to find out what a randomly selected sample of our membership thinks about a given issue. Such transparency would surely help to make JALT more responsive to its members' needs.
Which approach to use would depend on the information required. Inviting members to submit their views would probably elicit in-depth responses from those members who feel most strongly about a given issue. Conversely, conducting a telephone survey of a randomly selected sample of our membership would give us a rough idea of how our membership as a whole feels about the issue in question. And, of course, there is nothing to stop JALT from employing both approaches should the situation merit doing so.
It is doubtful that anyone who has witnessed JALT proceedings at the national level would seriously claim that we don't have a serious problem with two-way communication between our national leadership and our rank-and-file members. If the measures proposed above serve to improve such communication, a stronger organization will surely be the result.
References
Jannuzi, C. (2000). The Way Ahead and the Menu Option: Tangential to the plot? The Language Teacher, 24 (9), 3-5.
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