For almost a decade at Sagano High School, a public school in Kyoto, we have developed a course called Global Interaction (GI), which has a robust curriculum based off of the international connections we maintain. First, every year for 5 days, all 320 first year students travel to Singapore and attend 4 different schools. Also more than 150 international students travel to our school for interaction events from Singapore, Indonesia, the United States, and other countries every year. However, when 2020 began, it became apparent that our curriculum would have to change unless we came up with a way to continue our connections with our international partners. International connections and experiences are critically important during the high school years. After much work, over the course of the past year we have developed an online interaction program utilizing Google Classroom, Google Meet, pre-recorded videos, and many different scheduled events. We have developed two types of programs. First, a synchronous program. Students meet in live online interaction events where they spend 30-50 minutes doing show and tell, presentations, and other conversation-based activities over Google Meet. Over time they develop deeper connections with the students as they meet online over and over. The second program is an asynchronous one, involving the students recording videos for each other and then posting them within a closed Google Classroom. This presentation will go over the design and planning of this program, examples of the interactions, and how the international connections were made. We will go over the data collected from the students, on their impressions before and after the interactions in class and their perception on international interaction and friendships afterwards. Finally we will review how the program was reviewed, evaluated, and then changed for the 2021-22 school year, and how it has worked since.

The benefits of guest speakers in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes have been established by scholars such as Leor (2015) to be an effective way to provide specific knowledge to students while at the same time encouraging them to make a personal connection between the material and their life. Yet there are fewer studies that look at the benefits of guest speakers through the lens of fostering intercultural communication competence or intercultural collaborative dialogue in the classroom. Yet guest speakers can be crucial to intercultural competence in that they offer new perspectives, ideas, and language usage. This presentation builds on existing research into the efficacy of guest speakers to foster intercultural communication in any curricula through the introduction of case studies of global-issue oriented guest speakers, both in-person and online, with students of mixed English levels. We introduce student responses to guest speakers on diverse subjects such as Japanese colonialism, gender and sexuality, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and Japanese comfort women, among other topics, ultimately demonstrating the benefits of classroom collaboration with guest speakers. By discussing both online and in-person lectures, we demonstrate the efficacy of both and demonstrate ways guest speakers can be utilized in mixed-level English courses in Japanese universities.

Understanding what ESL students bring culturally to the learning experience is extremely important to designing any aspect of a language course. Moreover, learning to write effectively in English can be quite a challenge for the ESL leaner who may carry over many cultural approaches that conflict with learning to write in English. A well designed course will need to consider how these personal skills, habits, and motivations affect learning how to write a clear and coherent research paper. This session looks at quantitative data collected from 180 ESL students from diverse countries who have participated in learning academic writing while attending the Graduate School of Law at Nagoya University between 2012 and 2021. In addition to general language skill levels, the data indicates that personal writing skills in one's own language, deference to writing (motivation), as well as writing script (habit) can all play a significant role in just how well a student may adjust to and acquire an understanding of what is expected in academic writing. Such a study helps the writing instructor to design lessons based on a diverse understanding of the needs of the ESL student.

In this presentation, a telecollaborative exchange experience involving pre-service teachers of English in Japan and Germany will be discussed. The participants are 26 pre-service teachers at Tokyo Gakugei University in Japan (including one international student in Korea) and 9 students from Karlsruhe University of Education in Germany. The data is collected through AIE (Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters) to investigate the students’ reflection on the telecollaboration along with RFCDC (Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture) to further analyze each participants’ background. Furthermore, the recording of the session itself is employed for data analysis. The exchange was held on-line on July 5th in 2021 for 75 minutes. The group discussion was set as breakout rooms with 4 to 6 students followed by a whole group reflection session. The topics discussed in the break-out sessions include education systems, English learning, university life, etc. The result shows that the experience was positively perceived by almost all the students and for the Japanese students stimulating for their further English learning. The German students experienced English as a lingua franca and both groups noticed the differences in communication style as well as in education systems across Japan, Germany and Korea. Some students mentioned that it made them aware of new perspectives on their own culture. This may indicate that the mere one-time intercultural experience might have promoted their critical awareness of their own culture (Byram, 2021). The case of the student who participated from Korea stands out. By being multilingual (proficient in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and having attended an international school in China, she clearly functioned as a mediator (suggested in CEFR Companion Volume, 2020) to facilitate communication among the members in her group. Further case-studies will be discussed based on the results of the RFCDC descriptor analysis.

This presentation will deal with a best-practice example of the successful large-scale application of this year’s conference motto “collaboration and leadership in intercultural contexts” in higher education with a special focus and Asia and Europe. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), student teams from a German university were asked to design and pilot COIL (collaborative online international learning) activities with altogether seven Asian partner countries (including Japan) and eleven participating Asian universities (three of these being Japanese ones), targeting students and teaching staff from both regions (Asia and Europe). The COIL’s topic needed to be in line with the master course’s learning outcomes relating to intercultural communication and collaboration such as virtual team work and leadership across cultures in challenging times etc. Regarding the collaborative live online session, student teams were free to choose an approach they considered suitable and which allowed the integration of online collaborative tools encountered in class or beyond thanks also to their peers in Asia (e.g. video, quizzes, games etc.). The students’ seminar papers also built on this practical contribution by drawing on a suitable theoretical body of cultural approaches and frameworks encountered throughout the term. How such a major COIL project can be conducted successfully and to what extent it can serve as a direct contribution to promoting mutual understanding in the area of education and training between Asia and Europa in challenging times will be discussed in this presentation. Project success factors and pitfalls will be outlined and the results of a comprehensive post-COIL survey on the project’s impact on students’ cross-cultural skills in their role of future co-workers and company leaders will be presented.

Remote teaching and learning is not a new way to educate and teach. With the occurrence of COVID-19, more teaching and training have turned to online methods for delivering and educating students and trainees. This has brought about a number of challenges but also presented opportunities. This presentation will share reflections on how a blended learning PhD programme became fully online and embraced a collaborative leadership (CL) approach to help engage students and ensure the highest standard of education delivery. CL can be defined as a “leaderful practice” where anyone can become an initiator and contribute to the group success (Raelin, 2011). It involves shared, inclusive, and transformational tenets of leadership and allows the most informed and capable members to lead the charge in different circumstances. By engaging and encouraging CL with students, several beneficial outcomes were observed including strong group cohesion, student support for one another, student engagement and progress in the modules, as well as final assignment outcomes. Furthermore, ways to enhance these activities in the future have also been identified based on feedback and discussion with students. Several other opportunities have also been considered in light of discussions with my copresenter who is an expert in CL. In this joint presentation, the presenters aim to shed light on this alternative approach to teaching by sharing this example with SIETAR conference delegates and opening up discussions for how others may be able to adopt this approach themselves.

Intercultural Communication is difficult to define. One reason is the intertwined relation between language and culture. In the context of teaching foreign languages it is not only about the forms but what we can do with language and what we intend to do or express. Linguists will say that is pragmatics, but an interculturalist may claim it too. This presentation will approach and discuss the relation between language and culture from various angles and areas of research. To bring together these diverse and heterogenous fields, the key terms are contextualizing and meaningful. The data and examples are taken from teaching a second foreign language (here German) from the beginner level. The teaching material tries to include culture and pragmatics, with exercises for raising awareness and highlighting meta-structures. This aims to help learners to know more about their own language and culture. The theoretical background is related to various approaches to neuroscience of learning (Tokuhama-Espinosa), Larsen-Freeman, Developmental Model of Linguacultural Learning (Shaules), Galtung, and the action-oriented approach and the concept of mediation of the CEFR Companion Volume. This presentation aims to develop an integrative contextualized approach of language and culture with the term meaning and meaningful at the center.

Though Aichi records the top in Filipino population among Japan (Aichi Prefecture, 2020), children with Filipino background are often found not enrolling in public education. Even among those enrolled, the prefecture reports that around 1,600 Filipino students require Japanese language support. In addition, the number of children who do not go to school in Aichi is expected to be 1,846 (Nikkei.com, 2019). Realizing multi-culture in school is still on the way. What can we do to have all children receive equal rights to join quality education? Since 1998, Ecumenical Learning Center for Children: ELCC has educated more than 400 children who were at home due to vulnerable status or language barriers. Since staff members and teachers became aware that the barriers of enrolling were not only from language but also from culture, programs such as serving miso-soup and holding Tagalog lessons are now in the curriculum. This report shows how an ethnic school in Aichi has accepted unenrolled children with Filipino background, and prepared them to enter public schools. The research aims to know the current support ELCC provides, and to further seek for improvement in the educational environment to secure equal education for all. The study first reports the activities of the school, and then analyzes the interview and survey results from the staff members, volunteer teachers, the former students and their parents. The data revealed that language and cultures are the major issues in transfer to a local school. Moreover, successful attempts made by ELCC to reduce these burdens in enrolling public education are acknowledged. Furthermore, necessary improvement to lessen the barriers in public schools are proposed in terms of their language, intercultural communication, culture and identity in order to reduce the cases of withdrawal.

This presentation focuses on the virtual intercultural contact of small international heterogeneous teams of two or three student-participants enrolled in a graduate course called Transcultural Understanding Pedagogy entirely conducted online via Zoom at Kyoto University the spring of 2020. In recent times, virtual contact has become more pervasive due to innovations in telecommunication applications for computers, tablets, and smartphones and the COVID-19 global pandemic. Considering these factors, an up-to-date meta-analysis reported that international contact had a positive effect on prejudice reduction, especially when cooperation was involved, as opposed to the presence of an authority figure or common goals, which had little effect. The goal of the seminar to be discussed in this presentation was to achieve mutual transcultural understandings and prejudice reduction through the presentation and discussion of key emic cultural concepts chosen by the students and discussed during online interviews. There were two theoretical pedagogical approaches used to guide this teaching/researching endeavor: Team Learning (Tajino & Smith, 2015; Stewart, Dalsky, & Tajino, 2019) and Exploratory Practice (EP: Allwright, 2003; Hanks, 2019). This paper clarifies the details of a methodology called ‘virtual mutual transcultural understanding pedagogy,’ involving: 1) readings, 2) emic cultural concepts, 3) research questions, 4) intercultural exchanges, and 5) writings and reflections, which could be used for virtual transcultural education/training programs. We highlight the written collaborative products of the students that were posted on a website (https://interculturalwordsensei.org/), which provide evidence for their mutual transcultural understandings of emic cultural concepts by comparing/contrasting their translations using English. We also present additional evidence for virtual mutual transcultural understandings and prejudice reduction considering the Contact Hypothesis in the form of students’ reflections on the exchanges. Suggestions for the implementation of this pedagogy in transcultural education/training programs and further refinements considering its limitations are discussed.

With Japan's low recognition rate of refugees, it is easy to conclude the natives' overall indifference to this topic. However, once people learn the background stories of asylum seekers in direct, structured, face to face interactions, a different picture emerges. It is one of low awareness and confusion that evolves into curiosity, connection and inspiration that springs to collaborative civic action.

In this presentation I will introduce my 2-year activities delivering asylum seeker stories to the Japanese public (schools, businesses), the audience reactions, and case studies of audience members that lead action with initiative thereafter, share the insights on successful and unsuccessful aspects, key points for preparation, and considerations for future directions.

I will argue that open, authentic and confident autobiographical presentation is an effective way of changing the perception of asylum seekers and making a complex, biased, little-known topic accessible and easy for engagement. Finally, I will discuss the implications for applying it to other minority groups, and engaging the audience to one’s cause.

Despite recent government initiatives to promote internationalization in higher education, many students are not interested or able to participate in overseas exchanges. Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) can bridge the opportunity gap to global learning opportunities. This presentation outlines the implementation of COIL activities with students in China and Japan and reports on the impact of such activities on student perspectives to language development, motivation to study a foreign language, and intercultural competencies. This pilot study aims to better understand the perceived intercultural development and attitudes toward foreign language learning from students in China and Japan after participating in collaborative online international learning over eight weeks. After sharing these findings, the presentation will discuss the implications that this research has on various stakeholders. Finally, this presentation will reflect on the successes and difficulties of using technology to implement internationalization at home.

Abstract Cubism subsequently transformed Modern Art and broke the formalities of classical paintings creating new forms of expression. We propose in this new times of the intercultural knowledge to see how was the Leadership of the cubism after the renaissance. African Mask so profoundly affected Pablo Picasso that it provided the creative works that shed all conventions and enabled him to lead the twentieth century of Western Art Movement. We show how was this influence and the symbiotic relationship with concepts of African Art and to create a new aesthetic language for an intercultural leadership. We will identify some keys that Leadership through Cubism offered due to the impact of the intercultural field. Revisiting the Cubism can help to understand better the Intercultural leadership.