OUR FACILITATORS

Gordon Watanabe, EdD

Spokane, Washington, and Rancho Mirage, California, U.S.A.

• PL Founder
• Intercultural competency training and consulting
• Facilitating intercultural learning

PL work
Gordon Watanabe, EdD, is one of the three Founding Partners of the Personal Leadership practice and of the Personal Leadership Seminars organization. He leads the Fellows Program at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., where he infuses PL into the program to help interculturalists deepen their intercultural practice across difference and culture, both with others and within themselves.

He consults and trains with PL, and is a core instructor of the PL Foundations courses and the Training of Facilitator seminars. He is also one of the three authors of Making a World of Difference: Personal Leadership.

Other work
Gordon brought his developing understanding of intercultural communication, diversity and difference to his first professional work as a middle school science teacher. He then formally discovered Intercultural Communication when working at a university as the Director of International Student Affairs and Minority Student Affairs. In that position, he developed a residence-hall living-learning situation in which he brought together an equal number of students from three different cultures—U.S.-dominant, U.S.-non-dominant, and international students—and consciously used the principles of intercultural communication with them.

Gordon continued adding new dimensions to his knowledge during his tenure as the Asian Pacific American Counselor at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. In this position, he led the minority counseling staff training in intercultural communication. His dissertation was in part about creating a model that helped universities infuse intercultural learning into both the curricula and the co-curricula.

After his doctorate in Education, Gordon helped weave intercultural education into the fabric of the Master in Teaching program and the undergraduate teacher education curriculum at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Gordon was also asked to step into the President’s Cabinet where his job was to influence the other cabinet members into becoming interculturally knowledgeable and competent, able to advocate for intercultural change in their own departments.

Gordon continues to consult on intercultural competency with colleges, universities, and other organizations, helping them create climates of inclusion in which everyone interacts well across difference.

With his fellow PL Founders, Gordon has co-authored numerous articles on the theory and application of Personal Leadership.

Personal background
Gordon was born and raised in Southern California, a Japanese-American in a predominately white community of Orange County who went to church in a Japanese-American Baptist church located in the barrio of East Los Angeles. This very multicultural upbringing had both challenges and benefits. While not always easy, his childhood helped him be bicultural and see layers of cultural complexity early on.

Academic
Gordon holds a Bachelor’s double major in Biology and Psychology from Whitworth University in Spokane, WA. His masters, again from Whitworth, is in counseling education, and his doctorate is in education from Washington State University.

Other interests
Recently, Gordon has taken up painting, hiking, and mountain-biking. He continues to pursue his love of creating scrumptious meals for family and friends, and of singing for himself. He was initiated as a meditation teacher in 2000, and has held many energy meditation seminars over the last 15 years.