Supporting LGBTQIA+ students in the classroom

Yoshi Grote engages us in her experiences of bringing LGBTQ+ and gender-relevant content into the classroom through direct and indirect methods as well as infusing her personal background as a self-identifying LGBTQ+ individual.

A new faculty member in Japan: An ecological perspective on becoming a researcher

Sarah Mason uses an ecological perspective to relay her journey of becoming a researcher, combining it with teaching and a sense of service. She discusses issues of identity and agency and the importance of mentoring on this path.

Navigating academic leadership in Japan

Jo Mynard offers a reflective account of some themes and tools that have been instrumental in understanding herself and others better as she navigated the challenges of academic leadership. The author draws upon the literature in leadership and psychology and presents some tools that leaders in academia could use to create their own tools and stories. She shares her reflective narrative as an analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006) describing how particular tools had impact on her beliefs about herself as a leader and her identity as a foreign academic in Japan.

Diving into tertiary education: A duo-personal journey

Amanda Yoshida and Adrianne Verla Uchida use collaborative ethnography to narrate their journeys as educators from their secondary to tertiary education positions, both getting advanced degrees while working.

A teacher’s journey from Japanese to TESOL to housewife to something else entirely

Quenby Aoki explores various strands of her life, isolating the major transition points in the larger context of her teacher’s narrative. The author describes her transformation from professional to mother and “housewife” and her integration back into the life of an academic.

On forging a literary (and academic) life in Japan

Acclaimed author Suzanne Kamata describes her fight to be taken seriously in an academic institution. She interweaves her professional life as a writer with the challenges she faced in pursuing a career in higher education and in getting creative writing recognized as an academic discipline.

Resonant voices: Leadership skills for women in the ivory tower

Kathleen Brown discusses the concepts of executive presence, collaborative leadership, and linguistic resources as frameworks for leadership. In this chapter, the author explores how one might go about empowering one’s own voice and how this empowerment is related to a resonant voice.

Black, British and female in the Japanese university English classroom

Avril Haye-Matsui offers a compelling look at life for a Black woman teaching in Japan drawing upon an autoethnographical approach. Through her narrative, she uses autoethnography to reveal her “embodied intersectionality” (Mirza, 2017, p. 40) of race and gender.

Acting the part: Life in Japan as role-play

Wendy Jones Nakanishi tells us the story of her path as a Western woman who came to rural Japan for a career in higher education and the benefits and challenges she faced there. She shares her experiences of living the life as an employed university worker, on the one hand, and as a woman in a male-dominated family, on the other.

Waiting with bated breath: My journey to securing tenure

Kristie Collins chronicles her long and often frustrating transition from a contracted full-time position to a tenured one and the impact that her non-Japanese identity and gender played in this journey.