Students Awarded First Place in Video Challenge

Under the leadership of Holly Seonyeong Jo, assistant professor of political science, students Kate Donaldson ’28, Adriana Espiritu ’28, Brooke Gormley ’25, and Dillon Corwin ’28 took first place in the 2025 ASIANetwork Student Video Challenge.

ASIANetwork is a consortium of more than 140 North American colleges and universities whose goal is to promote education about Asia within the liberal arts.

Jo learned about ASIANetwork when she attended the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP) Institute at the East-West Center in Hawaii last summer. Eager to incorporate multimodal learning into her courses, she was excited to learn about the video challenge.

“Together with my colleague in Korea, we worked hard to integrate this project into our courses and help students navigate language, time zone, and cultural differences while collaborating,” Jo says. “The fact that all of our students had access to MacBooks ensured resource equity and facilitated both high-quality video production and seamless online meetings via Zoom.”

Moravian students collaborated with students from the Korea National University of Transportation (KNUT) to create a video no longer than 5 minutes on the theme of Asian interconnectedness. The challenge: “How are Asian societies interconnected among themselves, with North America and the rest of the world (e.g., labor migration, international marriage, popular culture, supply chain, public health, warfare)? Examine and analyze a case of Asian interconnections that are significant for Asia, North America, and the world in the future.”

Jurors, made up of faculty members and professionals with expertise in Asia, selected the winning submissions based on originality, depth and breadth of content, organization, and source citation.

The video “Death Penalty” by Gormley and Corwin earned top honors in the category US Students Team. The judges commented that the work was “very persuasive, analytical, and clear” and succeeded very well in “combining a structural political issue with people’s involvement across the Pacific.”

Donaldson and Espiritu collaborated with a student from KNUT on the video “Similarities and Changes in Eastern and Western Tipping Cultures: The Impact of Cultural Bias on Original Intent,” which took first place in the category Multimedia Collaboration between Asian and US Undergraduates. Judges’ remarks included the following: “well-produced with a novel subject,” “very engaging,” “interviews supported the thesis well,” and “the video showed true collaboration between Asia and the US.”

“I found the research and having to interact with someone from a different country most valuable,” Donaldson says. “There were a lot of differences and conflicts that we had to navigate, and it definitely made me appreciate and understand the challenges of cross-cultural interaction. The project helped me learn how to approach such interactions in the future.”

“The most valuable aspect of this experience was the opportunity to collaborate with someone who brought a different perspective and set of experiences to the topic we discussed in our video,” says Espiritu. “It was enlightening to gain insight into how similar concepts can be approached and understood across different cultures.

“What had the most impact on me throughout this project was the opportunity to develop new skills while also enhancing my existing ones,” Espiritu continues. “This was particularly evident in the process of collaborating with someone in a different time zone and who spoke a different language, which added a unique layer of complexity to the experience.”

Each student will be awarded $100, and their videos will be promoted on the ASIANetwork website and featured at the organization’s annual conference.

View a summary video of the students’ experiences filmed by Holly Seonyeong Jo, assistant professor of political science.