CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
PhD DAY
The PhD day will take place on September 22nd, exclusively reserved for the PhD students who have registered and paid (… Euros).
PhD Day will take the form of an afternoon workshop, during which PhD students will have the opportunity to present their research projects, including their research problems, designs, and methodologies. Experienced researchers will provide feedback on the presented dissertation projects, followed by discussions in small groups. This workshop will offer an excellent opportunity to meet fellow PhD students interested in educational resources from diverse international backgrounds and research fields.
Those presenting their projects will receive a certificate of achievement from IARTEM.
Contact and mandatory registration: iartem@uni.opole.pl
Location: University of Opole, Collegium Maius, Pl. Kopernika 11
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Topic of the lecture: Designing educational materials for multilingual and intercultural frontline communication: the CLEAR Model
Monika Tosik (Kopytowska) (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1065-7044) is a linguist and communication scholar affiliated with the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Lodz, Poland, where she earned her PhD. Her research combines pragmatics, Critical Discourse Studies, journalism and media studies, intercultural communication and cognitive approaches to meaning-making, with a particular focus on the pragma-rhetorical construction of conflict, ethnicity, religion, and security in media and institutional discourse. She is the author of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), which she has applied across media genres, thematic areas and sociocultural contexts, and has published widely in international journals and edited volumes.
She has been a visiting scholar at Lancaster University, the University of Nairobi, the University of Central Oklahoma and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, served as an external examiner at the University of Nairobi and Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, and is an alumna of the U.S. State Department’s highly competitive SUSI programme for journalists and media educators (Ohio University). She conducted workshops on media and conflict at the University of Zambia and the National University of Rwanda, and carried out fieldwork in media houses in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
Translating linguistic and intercultural research into socially responsive educational practice, she coordinated the Polish component of the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project – Creating Online Network, Monitoring Team and Phone App to Counter Hate Crime Tactics – co-financed by the European Commission (2015-2017) and, more recently, the national project Otwarta Łódź [Open Lodz], aimed at supporting the integration of foreigners present on the Polish labour market and strengthening the language and intercultural competences of frontline public-service workers, including law-enforcement officers. Within the latter project, she was involved in the design and implementation of innovative educational materials and training programmes for police officers, city guards, officials and migrant communities. This work is continued in the Team-up project, which focuses on language and intercultural communication training for police officers.
She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Lodz Papers in Pragmatics (De Gruyter Brill). Her academic and socially engaged work has been recognised through awards including the Internationalization Teaching Star national award (“Perspektywy” Foundation), the European Language Label, Łódzkie Eureka and the distinction “for Merits to the City of Lodz”.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Keynote Speaker: Marzanna Pogorzelska, University of Opole
Topic of the lecture: Beyond representation: how educational materials shape diversity, identity, and democratic citizenship: insights from contemporary Swedish school textbooks for a global society
Marzanna Pogorzelska is Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Opole, Poland. Her research interests include critical textbook studies, intercultural education, minority narratives, and critical discourse analysis. Her books and articles explore the social and ideological dimensions of educational materials and discourse, addressing such issues as neoliberal narratives and the hidden curriculum of school textbooks, colonialism, intercultural education, representations of disability and gender equality. Her work combines critical analysis of educational materials with a broader interest in their potential to foster more inclusive, equitable, and democratically oriented education. She has been the recipient of a research grant from the Polish National Science Centre for a project investigating the role of language textbooks in developing intercultural competence in the Swedish educational context, as well as a 2025 fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, where she pursued research on citizenship education and English-language textbook analysis. She has also been actively involved in international academic cooperation as a visiting lecturer and researcher, including collaborations with Karlstad University and Malmö University in Sweden, Kansas State University, and the University of Central Missouri in the United States. Her teaching activities focus primarily on teacher education and professional development.
Alongside her academic work, she has long been engaged in initiatives promoting equality, diversity, human rights, and intercultural education, working with schools, local communities, and non-governmental organisations. She has developed and participated in educational projects involving workshops, debates, exhibitions, and performances, including initiatives drawing on the Theatre of the Oppressed (Forum Theatre). She has also been involved with Amnesty International Poland and is a member of international scholarly associations in the field of textbook research.
From 2019 to 2024, she served as the University of Opole’s Plenipotentiary for Equal Rights and currently serves as Plenipotentiary for Equality and Diversity at the Faculty of Philology, where she continues her work to promote equality and counter discrimination within the academic community. Her commitment to equality, diversity, and human rights has been recognised through several awards, including the Irena Sendler Award “For Repairing the World” and the European Tolerance Award.