My Experience When I Joined LD30 for the First Time

Chisato Ozawa
Shukutoku University
r21015s[at]u[dot]shukutoku[dot]ac[dot]jp

My Experience When I Joined LD30 for the First Time

This was my first time attending a conference like LD30. I feel that I gained a lot of experience and new
knowledge through this conference. In this reflection, I would like to write about the experiences andtwo new things I learned. In particular, I have realized the prejudice I had against people from othercountries, and the importance of clarifying my thoughts. Overall, I will write about my experiences andwhat I have learned.
When I started working part-time at a restaurant after entering university, I had several difficult
experiences when I served foreigners because I could not understand their language. Before attending
the LD30 conference, I had a prejudice against foreigners as being difficult to talk to because of thelanguage barrier. However, when I actually spoke with people from overseas, they were much easier
to talk to than I had expected, as they used gestures and simple words to convey their opinions on thediscussion topics in a way that was easy to understand even for someone like me who is not very goodat English.
It was a good experience because I was able to eliminate my prejudice. By participating in thisconference, I was able to learn that language is not the only way to communicate, and that evenif people are of different nationalities and do not speak the same language, it does not mean thatthey cannot communicate with each other at all.
The second new thing I learned was how to clarify my thoughts. I learned this method from the work
I did during Devon Anderson’s presentation on communication. One of the activities that I enjoyeda lot was expressing my community in colours because I had never thought about my community insuch a way, and the activity helped me imagine and visualise my community. After the presentation,
I answered the question “What can we do as a community to overcome these challenges?” An
action to make a difference for my community is to talk to people in different departments. Throughworkshops on leadership and positive psychology, I learned that it is important to have diverse
perspectives and goals related to those perspectives in order to solve problems.
After attending the conference and thinking for myself about what the theme of this year’s conference,“Learning for Change and Action, Making a Difference for the Future,” was all about, two ideas
emerged. The first idea is to set one’s own goals and take action. I got this idea when I took a workshop
at the LD30 Conference on leadership and “positive psychology”. In this workshop, participants were
given the opportunity to share their problems and desires with others. There, I learned that having
diverse perspectives on things is very important for problem solving. Before attending this workshop,
I had no goals and mostly worked passively. However, after attending this workshop, I feel that I havebeen able to set goals that match what I need to do and what I want to achieve, and I am now able totackle things proactively.
The second idea was the importance of actively communicating with others. The catalyst for this isthat through the LD30 conference as a whole, I was able to talk not only with Japanese nationals
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but also with people from overseas and people of the same generation from other universities. Itwas through these conversations I was able to gain perspectives and knowledge that I did not have
before.
In response to the conference, I would like to discuss future goals and actions. My goal for the future
is to broaden my perspective. Specifically, I would like to be conscious of eliminating preconceptions
about things and avoiding prejudice and become more accepting of diverse values. As a concrete
action, I would like to communicate more actively. This is because I believe that by talking withothers, I can gain more knowledge and use that knowledge to broaden my perspective. I would liketo work in a welfare-related job in the future, and I believe that I will be involved with people fromall walks of life. Therefore, I believe that this broad perspective will help me to empathise with thevalues and lifestyles of people in various positions and to find solutions that are tailored to eachindividual. Before participating in this conference, I had not been a proactive learner, but joining
the poster presentations by fellow university students, I was inspired by the fact that they had more
knowledge than I did, and it made me want to learn more, not only about English, but also other fieldsof knowledge. This was my first time to participate in such a conference and I was very nervous, but it
was a very good experience to increase my motivation for learning.
My hope is that this reflection will encourage readers to think about the prejudices they unconsciously
hold and how to eliminate them once they become aware of them.

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