Abstract

Japanese government internationalisation initiatives in recent years have aimed to create undergraduate courses that nurture "global human resources". These initiatives involve objectives associated with developing skills, attitudes, and knowledge related to foreign language skills and intercultural understanding. However, educators at Japanese universities responsible for their development and implementation often lack adequate guidance to achieve such objectives. To address this gap, the author employed an interdisciplinary approach to establish a framework for cultivating global human resources, by means of a qualitative inquiry involving visual and narrative methods carried out over a one-semester period. The study's results emphasise the transformative and personal relationships that learners establish when engaging in the development of global human resources, a perspective that is mostly absent in the intercultural competence literature. Moreover, this study underlines the importance of producing and implementing interdisciplinary educational solutions that encourage university students to become personally invested in developing global human resources, contributing to the advancement of knowledge in the field.

Keywords: global human resources, transformative learning, personalised learning, foreign language and intercultural development, curriculum design

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