Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper logs the self-expressed identities of educators who undertook an International Baccalaureate Educator Certificate (IBEC) program in Japanese higher education. I illustrate a profound divide between their grounded stories for taking IBEC, versus those of a top-down economic nationalism.

Paper long abstract

As part of the Japanese Government’s push to cultivate so-called gurōbaru

jinzai (‘global human resource’ or ‘global jinzai’), a promotional consortium was

established in 2013 by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and

Technology (MEXT), and the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO).

International Baccalaureate (IB) schools have risen from 16 that year, to 137 as of

November 2025, while IB Educator Certificate (IBEC) programs at soon-to-be nine local

universities have surfaced during this same juncture. Select educational elites inside this

IBEC community have since promoted a new trope believed necessary to help cultivate

such ‘global jinzai’: gurōbaru kyōiku jinzai (‘global educator resource’ or ‘global

educator jinzai’). I draw on a year of participatory fieldwork inside an IBEC program to

highlight an inherent disconnect between this economically nationalist discourse, and the

self-expressed identities of the people undertaking the initiative. Informed by 34 semi-structured interviews, supplemented by field notes and relevant survey data, I

urge societal elites to abandon a culture of top-down governance that semantically

perplexing, humanly unfaithful slogans like ‘global (educator) jinzai’ are symptomatic of.

I instead call for such leadership to have its privileged agendas kept in check by

prioritizing bottom-up approaches to policy and strategy making. In this instance, having

its narratives and language informed by those navigating education in the

names of the ‘international’ and ‘global’ on the ground.