卒業生教員の皆さん

“I want to move forward as an educator with confidence, knowing that I graduated from a university that promotes DEI.”

I may not remember the exact words, but the message was clear. They came from a rookie teacher who is also an alumna. As someone representing the university, and as someone who has been involved in advancing DEI for many years, I do not think this rookie teacher could fully appreciate just how much those words meant to me.

I was invited to give a talk titled Connecting Secondary and Tertiary Education: From the Perspective of DEI. The topic grew out of the previous year’s symposium on supporting children whose first language is not Japanese, and the broader reality that students with increasingly diverse backgrounds are now learning across all levels of education. I was also asked to touch on Japanese-language support and the work of our DEI Center, so I chose to speak more broadly about how our university is advancing DEI—its structure, policies, initiatives, and remaining challenges.

At the reception afterward, I had the chance to talk with several rookie teachers. “It’s really tough,” they would say—with a smile. And almost without exception, they would add that they were very fond of their students.

They spoke about many different aspects of teaching: the challenge of teaching English to first-year junior high school students, the sheer amount of work involved in being a teacher, and the many things that happen both inside and outside the classroom.

I could see that they were still feeling their way as teachers. They were struggling with the constant demands of the job while also wanting to make each lesson better and give more to their students. They were also trying to work out the right distance to keep: close enough that students would feel comfortable coming to them, but with enough distance to retain an objective perspective and to speak not simply as a friend, but as a teacher and educator. Listening to them brought back vivid memories of what I was like when I was a rookie teacher myself.

My conversations with more experienced teachers gave me a glimpse of some of the issues at the heart of realizing DEI in education. There are growing numbers of students with foreign roots at every level of schooling, from elementary school through junior and senior high school. Teachers are grappling with how to help all children develop in ways that will serve them well in the future, while also respecting each child’s individuality and cultural background.

Things that had long been taken for granted are also being called into question. One teacher, for example, mentioned a child who refused to wear a white hat. It raised the possibility that white may carry an inauspicious meaning in some cultural contexts—something that is not generally assumed in Japanese schools. There are also very practical challenges. How do you help students acquire Japanese-language skills while keeping up with all the other work a teacher has to do? How do you support a child effectively when neither the child nor their guardians have a strong command of Japanese? At the same time, I was reassured to hear that children often pick up the language remarkably quickly—sometimes much faster than their parents.

I found that I could relate very strongly to the challenges these teachers were working through. I also felt a real sense of camaraderie with them as educators working at different levels of education. All the more reason, I thought, that we need closer connections not only between high schools and universities, but across the different levels of education more broadly.

I was very grateful for the opportunity to speak directly with these alumni who are now teachers—not only as alumni of our university, but also as fellow educators.