Interested in becoming a Tokyo JALT officer?
The Annual Report is a mandatory part of being an NPO and at Tokyo JALT we have dutifully written and filed it every year. I thought that this year we might, for transparency's sake, share it with you. As you can see, we have a lot of people working on a variety of projects, not everything goes as we planned, but overall things usually do go well--because of our team's hard work.
To give you a little more background, the report is part of the annual review process which all Chapters and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) must go through to prove they are worthy of continuing in good standing. Chapters and SIGs receive points for a variety of things including events held, publications produced, the number of people on their boards, how many members they have, and so on. As the largest Chapter, we have a bit easier time because we have more people willing to volunteer... and we have a larger budget which helps as well. As you will read, we do a lot with it and with your support, so I think I can say with pride that we are very much a chapter in good standing.
Tokyo Chapter President: Matthew Kocourek
President--Matthew Kocourek
At Tokyo Chapter this has been a tumultuous, but very successful year and I have my officers and our members to thank for it.
We held 16+ events, including inviting big name speakers, such as Jonathan Newton (Translanguaging), JD Brown (Mixed Methods research), Yoko Goto Butler (Self Assessment and Younger Learners) and we invited Yuko Goto Butler to present at the International Conference on our behalf as well (thanks to Dawn Lucovich, Yuko Tanahashi, and Darla Cornett for helping make that possible).
In addition, we held several very successful events for teachers of younger learners (thanks to Marian Hara). And I would be remiss if I forgot to thank our incoming Programs Chair, Jackie Talken, who helped make the events from summer on run more smoothly and who is working hard on next year already, and our outgoing Social Events Chair, Michele Joel, who helped plan three social events and two events with the West Tokyo Chapter--you will be missed Michele.
Besides our events, we have a lot more to brag about, but I will keep it short. With your support, dear members, we rewarded a research grant to Hidayat Polim--congrats Hidayat! In addition, we awarded the 2019 Best of JALT to Liz Shek-Noble for her presentation at last year's State of the Chapter.
In addition to that, and despite our previous struggles with our website, Haruka Ubukata (Publicity Chair) helped us to further develop our latest website, and our outgoing Public Relations Chair, Sarara Momokawa, helped us similarly develop our social media accounts. Another area we have been working hard on is outreach to JET's and ALT's and thanks to Lydia Leung for her support helping outreach to those communities.
Also, I must send so much thanks to our longest serving chair, our Treasurer, Darla Cornell. Darla, without your efforts, we could not have accomplished any of this.
However, we also said good-bye to Dawn Lucovich (thanked above for helping us convince Dr. Butler to come present for us), to Jeff Martin, our outgoing Membership Chair who dutifully took care of our extensive membership lists last year, and to Maiko Sawada, our outgoing Secretary, who helped reserve spaces for meetings. Thanks to all of you. And thanks to you, dear reader, for your patience with that long list of thank-you's.
Going forward, Tokyo Chapter will continue to work on ways to collaborate with the greater Tokyo Area, including West Tokyo, Saitama, and Yokohama. In addition, I want to find ways to further our outreach to the Japanese community and to the K-12 teachers. Finally, this year we featured presentations on labor law at our State of the Chapter which were very popular and I think this speaks to the eagerness our community has to learn about their rights in this ever-changing industry. Let's do more on that front as well.
Social Events Chair--Michele Joel
In 2019, I arranged 3 casual dinners for members to gather and reflect on teaching practices. In the past, I had a focused topic and short "presentation" to introduce this topic, but members were inclined to talk about their own topics, which seemed to be mostly focused on professional development.
I also arranged facilities for various events and the dinners that followed.
TJJ Liaison--Michele Joel
The TJJ committee had not been active for some time, so I offered to try to get things moving again by contacting authors and being the middle step between the authors and reviewers. This position proved inactive as we did not have many submissions. The one author I did have contact with was not keen to send rewrites of her work and did not contact me. The committee had some trouble with the layout which was resolved.
Due to overwhelming personal circumstances, I had to resign my position in December after serving for 3 and a half years. I am glad to have been a part of Tokyo JALT and look forward to future events.
Publicity Chair--Haruka Ubukata
As the Publicity Chair, I have been responsible for editing/updating the contents of our website and composing our monthly newsletter. I have also archived the information about all the previous events we have held, so people can always look back on what we did in the past years.
In 2020, I would like to continue to work on our website and monthly newsletters, and provide up-to-date information to all the current as well as future Tokyo JALT members.
Programs Chair--Jackie Talken
2019 was a busy year for the Tokyo Chapter, with 15 events, including Translanguaging, Technology, Self Assessment and Labor Issues, and our popular Young Learner events. We were fortunate to be able to host 4 esteemed professionals in the field: Nick Ellis, Jonathan Newton, Yuko Goto-Butler and J.D. Brown. In addition to these events, we also partnered with various SIGs and featured the research and best practices of local Tokyo Chapter members.
We are hoping to provide a similar line-up of events for the upcoming year, with a mix of theoretical and practical, established scholars and promising novices. We have plans to more actively promote the Young Learner events as well. One challenge we face going forward is event space as we have recently lost the use of the free venue we used previously. We are hoping to partner with Associate Members and boost publicity of events to increase attendance in order to offset the added expense.
Treasurer--Darla Cornett
Tokyo Chapter’s finances have been healthy overall this year. Expected revenues were overestimated in the budget planning last year. However, with about three months and at least one more event planned before the end of the fiscal year, the current gap between the projected budget and actual revenue should decrease for events (¥70,000 vs. ¥47,000). Additionally, while the chapter gained some new local members this year, many of them were at the discounted rate for students and ALTs/JETs, and that impacted the revenue we received. This is something that will need more consideration in planning the 2020-2021 budget. A final point of note, as with last year, the Younger Learner events the chapter hosted were, again this year, the biggest source of event related revenue for the chapter.
The chapter’s expenses were well handled this year, and it is likely (assuming no surprise expenses) that the chapter will be under budget this year. As of January, the predicted events expense was ¥500,000, but has only amounted to ¥220,575 thus far. This can be credited to the officer team working to host more joint events and forging stronger connections with JALT’s Associate Members to help defer costs.
The biggest difficulties for treasury this year have been getting the MAS in on time, due to both technology and time issues of the Treasurer, and making clear the rules regarding the use of JALT finances to other officers. The former problem should be partially cleared up in the coming year with a PC upgrade. The latter was taken up with the National Board, and their feedback was discussed at an officer meeting. Plans were made to implement a new system in the coming year to ensure all current and future officers have a better understanding of how the Chapter’s budget can be used.
Teaching Younger Learners Chair---Marian Hara
We held 3 events again this year, in February, May and December (cancelling October due to the typhoon) Attendance varied a lot. In May several who had booked didn't turn up, but in December we had a huge turnout of (around 30) which filled the room. Over the year we have brought in significant revenue and several local members.
Sessions focused on the younger learners bring in more people but we don't want to give up on the higher levels. We're mostly doing 4-hour sessions so we might organize it with the first half for younger levels and the rest for teachers of JH and SH. We had a small display of books by Pearson in February and December and the SIG supported the travel cost for one speaker in December. Our aim is to have a team in place to share the work of publicising, planning and translation. We are building up a number of repeaters, so we must be doing something right! Good work team and many thanks to our great presenters!! It seems to be a good idea to continue with a mailing list in addition to online posting, and we hope to expand the outreach to organizations and sites for Japanese teachers of English.