ELTA Serbia is delighted to announce the fourth plenary speaker for the 24th ELTA Serbia International Conference. ✨🏛️
Joe Walther is an English Language Fellow at Daugavpils University with more than 25 years of professional experience in English language education. His work focuses on curriculum design, teacher development, and learner-centred pedagogy, with particular attention to creativity, instructional coherence, and cross-cultural teaching contexts. 🌍📚
His plenary session, From Delivering Content to Designing Experiences: Bridging Theory, Practice, and Professional Purpose, speaks to a familiar classroom reality. Teachers everywhere balance curriculum demands with the lived realities of learners, and this keynote explores how that balance can be approached as a design challenge rather than a rejection of essential knowledge. In other words, it asks not only what is taught, but how learners engage with, interpret, and apply what they learn. 🧠✨
The session introduces core principles of experience design in education and highlights the pedagogical decisions teachers already make intuitively. By making those decisions more visible and deliberate, the talk offers ways to support adaptability across contexts, including low-tech classrooms and high-stakes, exam-oriented environments. Participants will be encouraged to view experience design as a bridge between global educational conversations and local classroom practice, recognising teacher expertise, incorporating learners’ perspectives, and supporting equitable participation. 🤝🌉
Aligned with the conference theme No Borders, Just Bridges, the keynote shows how experience design can strengthen professional connections, support learner agency, and deepen cross-cultural understanding. Attendees will leave with a clear framework for reflecting on their own teaching and concrete ways to enhance everyday practice without requiring additional tools, technologies, or resources. ✅🎓
