From Past Lessons to Future Possibilities: Marking 30 Years of ICIS

Roxanna Senyshyn, PhD, Pennsylvania State University, Abington, Pennsylvania, USA

At the 2026 TESOL Convention in Salt Lake City (March 24–27, 2026), we will be celebrating 60 years of TESOL and, alongside it, 30 years of the Intercultural Communication Interest Section (ICIS). Moments like these invite reflection. What have we learned? What questions still challenge us? And what new possibilities are emerging as our field continues to change?

As both the current historian of ICIS and a former Chair (2019-2020) and Co-Chair (2020-2021), I have spent the past few months reaching out to former ICIS leaders, inviting them to look back and to think forward - to reflect on where we have been, what challenges define the present, and what futures we might imagine for intercultural communication in TESOL. I will share a brief snapshot of these reflections (from a short survey) at the opening of our special ICIS Academic Session. The larger goal, however, is collective: to create space for dialogue about interculturality in English language learning and teaching at a moment when multilingualism, mobility, technology, global uncertainty, and ongoing global emergencies are reshaping our work in profound ways.

Our anniversary ICIS Academic Session, From Past Lessons to Future Possibilities: Rethinking Interculturality in TESOL, brings together scholars whose work has shaped and continues to challenge how we think about culture, language, intercultural communication, and power. Scheduled for Thursday morning, the session situates ICIS’s history within broader shifts in TESOL since the mid-1990s. Ryuko Kubota (University of British Columbia) will reflect on critical histories and decolonial possibilities, asking what intercultural communication might look like if it were no longer centered on English. Kristen Lindahl and Daniela Silva (University of Texas at San Antonio) will draw on recent research to explore teacher identity, cultural and linguistic self-efficacy, and intercultural praxis in teacher education. Joan Kang Shin (George Mason University) will turn our attention to global networks, technology-mediated professional development, and the possibilities and limits of transnational collaboration.

To understand why these questions still matter, it helps to remember how ICIS began. ICIS did not simply “emerge”; it was created because intercultural communication, paradoxically, had no real home in TESOL. In the mid-1990s, culture was assumed to belong everywhere, and as a result, it often belonged nowhere. As Margaret Coffey, ICIS Founding Chair (1996–1998), reminds us, proposals focused on intercultural issues were routinely sidelined. Recognizing this gap, incoming TESOL President Joy Reid supported the creation of an interest section that would give intercultural communication visibility, voice, and advocacy. After months of organizing and a dramatic moment at the 1997 convention when Joy Reid publicly argued for ICIS just hours before assuming the presidency, the vote passed. ICIS was born, with a mission that still resonates: to center intercultural communication within TESOL and to ask hard questions about culture, equity, and responsibility in language education.

Thirty years later, those questions have not lost their urgency. They have only multiplied. We hope you will join us in marking this moment - honoring our past and imagining what intercultural communication in TESOL might become next.

Please join us on Thursday, March 26, from 8:00–9:15 a.m. in Ballroom J at the Salt Palace Convention Center.

Roxanna Senyshyn is the Past Chair (2019-2020) and Past Co-Chair (2020-2021) of the ICIS. In 2022-2023 she served as the TESOL 2023 Convention program coordinator of the Culture and Intercultural Communication Strand. Roxanna is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics and Communication Arts and Sciences at Abington College, Pennsylvania State University in Abington, PA, USA. Her teaching encompasses TESOL/ESL education, applied linguistics, and intercultural communication courses. Her research focuses on transformative intercultural learning in teacher education, intercultural competence development, English learner and newcomer family engagement and teacher professional development. In her current role in the ICIS, she is a Historian and she supports the leadership team in accomplishing its strategic goals. She can be reached at [email protected]