The Language Teacher
05 - 2003
A Chapter in Your Life
Wade Muncil
This month, JALT Osaka's Program Chair, Wade Muncil, talks to us about the efforts his chapter is making to keep a dynamic group of professionals together. The coeditors warmly encourage 800-word reports of chapter interest in English, Japanese, or a combination of both.
A Chapter in My Life: From KALT to JALT Osaka
Our Osaka chapter is proud to be one of the founding cornerstones of JALT. KALT (The Kansai Association for Language Teaching) was conceived in Odawara in 1974 and born in Osaka in 1975, weighing in at a healthy 50 members. Similar groups subsequently formed in the Kanto and Tokai regions, and in 1977, all three combined to establish JALT. The rest is language-teaching history.
In its growth years, KALT, and subsequently JALT Osaka, provided a social hub and enjoyed attendance numbers often exceeding 100 members at meetings. Those were the days! However, with changing demographics, JALT Osaka is no longer the only game in town. There are now several groups such as the British Council, Temple University's Osaka branch, ETJ (English Teachers in Japan), as well as publishers and online sites that help support foreign and Japanese language teachers. Participation in our chapter has dwindled accordingly.
At present, our meetings are typically attended by officers and a smattering of our members. The sessions are productive, friendly, and professional, whereas the after-meeting gatherings, "night school," are a time to get to know each other and have fun. These after-meeting powwows are a vital part of our cohesiveness and a great time to digest and gain different perspectives on what went on at the more formal confabs. They are also where many of our new ideas are conceived and put into motion. The combination of serious business and socializing seems to work for us in facilitating good talk about good teaching.
We would love to see better attendance at Osaka JALT meetings, but everyone understands how difficult it can be to set aside time on a Sunday afternoon to go to ANOTHER meeting. To try and improve our turnout, we've been experimenting with various meeting sites, program ideas, and local membership schemes. We've tried more expensive but more easily accessible venues. We had a Saturday night meeting in a room adjoining an Irish pub, a park in northern Osaka last autumn provided a beautiful and free setting, and our most recent meeting was held at a small, home-style conversation school. We teamed up with the Kobe Chapter to put on a very successful joint meeting in November as part of the Four Corners Tour. We're continuing to look for ways to work with publishers and other groups and to work as efficiently as we can as a team. Collaboration means half the work and twice the product. Everyone is busy and we want no one to burn out. Our April meeting will be a combined "My Share" style meeting and family-style hanami picnic in Osaka Castle Park, which we hope will serve some of the social, recreational, and professional needs of a large number of our members. We're striving to be more inclusive and more representative of various teaching and learning contexts and interests of those in our area. As one way of doing this, we've begun offering local memberships, with the aim of recruiting more Japanese teachers and students, among others.
We are also looking for ways to serve members who may choose not to attend meetings no matter when, where, or how they are held. We're hoping that we can utilize the Internet more to serve such members with better communication and more frequent reminders of upcoming events throughout the region. We're also currently in the process of conducting an online survey in an effort to better understand, represent, serve, and involve our members and our community. Things have changed a lot since the boom years of baby KALT. We may not again match the attendance at our meetings of those days, at least not on a regular basis. But especially now with the ease with which information can be shared on the Internet, we feel that there is a lot more we can do to be of service to our members and our community, both personally and professionally. Our linguistic sandbox is full of fun and has a lot of potential. We may not be able to be all things to all members, but we firmly believe we can be more things to more members. That is our goal. We welcome the challenge.
For me, it is a joy to interact with such dedicated and talented professionals, exchanging ideas on the profession we love. JALT is our sandbox where we conceive, create, and present plans to enhance education in the Osaka region and beyond. One of our officers is even leading an effort to form a Non-Profit Organization that will help serve education in Vietnam. If our officers mirror our future, then that future looks quite promising.
Reported by Wade Muncil, Program Chair, JALT Osaka; caavo504@hcn.zaq.ne.jp
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