Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on an ethnographic study on junior academics who are responsible for professional development of faculty members and provide accounts of how they are lost in third space of the university in Japan and how their lived experiences and Japanese concepts help them navigate their lives.

Paper long abstract:

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, MEXT, introduced and recommended institutional faculty development in 1999 and later mandated it in 2008. As a result, universities created the role and position of faculty development practitioners. Those faculty development practitioners have been involved in crafting a genre of faculty development that reconcile policy requirement, university's requirements, and their personal understanding. This paper draws on an ethnographic study on junior academics who are responsible for professional development of faculty members, faculty development, in Japan.

The work of faculty development takes place in a territory between the conventional academic and professional domains, which Whitchurch (2008) terms third space. Characteristics of third space include ambiguous working conditions, non-positional authority, and often outside mainstream communication channels, but safe space to be creative and experimental (Whitchurch 2008). Those who work in third space have to deal with issues led by unfixed work, no role model, no set career path, unclear sets of skills and body of knowledge, and little understanding of the role from other staff (Whitchurch 2008), which is exactly what faculty development practitioners in Japan are faced with.

To deal with the complexities and to fulfill their duties, and to also manage their own career path, each member began to rely on individual past experiences, professional values, and career prospects to make decisions about their work and professional identity. As a result, culturally-rooted Japanese concepts such as "on", "shigarami" and "tantōsha" seem to help them feel connected and deal with multiplicities of their identity.

In the presentation, I at first describe how those practitioners are lost in the third space. I then provide accounts of how lived experiences eventually inform their decision-making and stories of practitioners who came to intentionally or unconsciously use these Japanese concepts to navigate their working life and formation of their professional identity. I end with a consideration of how unconsciously embedded Japanese-ness appear when one's professional identity becomes unsteady.