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Spring 2026 NAATPl Event: Building a Successful Polish Program

Creating additional instructional materials has become a standard practice for instructors and teachers of Polish as a foreign language (PFL), although such materials are often limited to specific grammatical or cultural topics. Reusable teaching materials (also known as reusable learning objects) address this problem by promoting the development of resources that can be adapted for use across different student levels and cohorts.

Spring 2026 Event Building a Successful Polish Program with Iwona Sadowska, Georgetown University webinar on Thursday, April 30, 2026 by the North American Association of Teachers of Polish (NAATP

Building a successful Polish language (and culture) program is a challenge faced by all instructors of Polish as a foreign language. The 2025 NAATPl Polish Enrollment Report indicates that instructors are actively engaged in outreach and promotional efforts, which they hope will translate into higher student enrollment. This event will focus on such efforts by using the example of Georgetown University, whose Polish program has been particularly successful in reaching out to both prospective students and the wider campus community.

In the first 2026 event, we will hear from Dr. Iwona Sadowska, head of the Polish program at Georgetown University. The goal of this event is to highlight successful initiatives within the Polish language instructors’ community and to provide a platform for exchanging ideas, solutions, and future plans. We hope to offer additional programming of this kind, focusing on similar initiatives at specific institutions or within individual Polish programs in the future.

The event will feature a presentation from Dr. Sadowska followed by an open discussion. Given the importance of sharing advice and experience for the wellbeing of our programs, this event will be open to all interested, regardless of their current membership status. Traditionally, the working languages of the event will be Polish and English.

About the speaker: Dr. Iwona Sadowska is head of the Polish program at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where she teaches Polish and Russian language, Slavic literatures, and film studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and with the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) in the School of Foreign Service. She is the author of Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar, published by Routledge. A newly revised and expanded second edition of Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar is under contract with Routledge to be published in 2026.

Sadowska holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin. Her fields of research include higher education studies, critical pedagogy, and film studies. Prof. Sadowska has previously worked on linguistics projects with the University of Maryland, College Park. She has lived, worked, and traveled in over 50 countries and traversed Eurasia overland from the Pacific to the Atlantic via Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Event details

Title: Building a Successful Polish Program

Date: April 30, 2026

Time: 2 pm (Chicago) / 3 pm ( New York) / 9 pm (Warsaw)

Location: Zoom (waiting room initially): https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/93157144466

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