The board was very busy during the Fall meeting in Copenhagen. I (Mats Olsson MO, the editor of Etenjournal) had the pleasure to interview Michael Roemer (MR) from TCU, Fort Worth, Texas. Hopefully we can publish more portraits of interesting ETEN people here. Link to portraits.

MR: Well, I was born and raised in Arlington, Texas, and probably one of the most formative things that ever happened to me in my childhood was when I moved to Japan when I was eight years old. My father was a visiting professor at a university in a pretty small town in Japan, so my sister and I were the only non-Asian children, which meant that if we wanted to make friends, we had to learn Japanese. In retrospect that year living in Japan and assimilating as best as possible for a little boy with green eyes and brown hair really opened my eyes. That lead to my undergraduate studies in Japanese. I graduated from college and my wife and I got married and we both moved to Japan and worked in Japan for a year. Japan has been a recurring theme throughout my life. I’ve lived there for three years and visited it 12 times for research and with high school and college students.

MO: Can you point out a specific thing in the Japanese culture that attracts you?

MR: As a child it was just about being a kid. I knew the food was different, and I missed root beer and pizza because there weren’t many western products.

I have limited memories of course, I have highlights memories spending a night at a friends house playing hide and seek and thinking I could count faster in Japanese than in English. I remember the only time in my life where I  had a fight was in Japan. I guess it was the stress of a child living living in a foreign country.

MO: and not being quite fluent in the language?

MR: as an adult i realize that, but as a child I was just busy being a kid. I also learned from that experience that if you can make someone laugh in another language you have a pretty good grasp at that language. So that has always been a goal for me to maintain. Humour has always been a big part of my personality.

Japanese tend to be really kind and giving, the people I’ve spent the most time with, they are just good human beings. I like that they tend to be organised, too. That’s kind of who I am.

MO: There is a formal side in that culture?

MR: Oh yes, a very formal structure and it takes a while for you to be on the inside. Perhaps longer than some other cultures. But once you’re in everyone is very genuine. It’s important to understand that and not be offended when you are NOT on the inside. There is a treshold you have to pass.

We were talking about the Danish tradition (Julefrukost) where once a year you have this opportunity to go out of control within your company and tell your boss like it is. They have the same thing in Japan. Anytime you go out drinking with your colleagues, it’s considered a setting where you can say basically whatever you want, and it’s supposed to be forgotten the next day. 

But it was hard to get used to the life in an office in Japan. There were things I didn’t like, but the predictability was nice. I felt like I made some really good friends there. All that came back to me when I became Director of Global Education at Trinity Valley School. I wanted to create that experience for other kids. Because I work in a preschool, primary and secundary school I have the opportunity to help younger kids think about the world beyond where the are now. At the same time I have opportunities to bring people to my school and help our guests see America beyond stereotypes.

MO: Weŕe making a smooth transition into the next question here – how did you get involved with ETEN?

MR: Dale Young was the ECO of TCU (Texas Christian University), and I think he went to my boss when he found out that my school was going to create this Director of Global Education position. He said, “You should join ETEN! It will expose you to different countries and you will meet this incredible network.” He was a huge fan, so my boss just said, “Ok, that sounds great.” We did become members officially after the fall meeting 2011; though, I did not go to that Fall meeting, because I was busy creating my program and didn’t know the school well enough to represent it. But the principal of our Lower School went – it was in Sweden – so my first ETEN meeting was in Coimbra, Portugal. At first, I spent most of my time at ETEN with Dale, but after some time I was able to branch our and be my own person in ETEN.

MO: Can you describe the difference between ETEN 2011 and 2024?

MR: I would say that at its core it is very similar. Networking is still a primary purpose. There are a lot of good friends in ETEN. People are still doing internationalisation. Even though that is a separate TIG, when we are meeting as ECOs and TIG leaders the focus is internationalisation. Some of the changes are that we are bigger, we have more members, we have a better website (!) and I think in some ways structurally we are doing a little bit better in terms of how the board functions. I think we step back and think of bigger questions, like the future of ETEN and what we stand for. Today during the workshop we were talking about the mission.

MO: It is not only about solving problems? 

MR: The mission that we have is very long; not a traditional mission. I learned that we in the board have to go back and read it and talk about it (check this Michael – my interpretation).
There was a time when I was just an ETEN member, I was not even a voting member, until three years ago. There were things that did not make sense to me, but now I am in a place where, instead of just wondering about it I can do something about it. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to be a board member. I wanted to be able to be a part of that conversation in different ways and try to effect some changes within an area which I think matters to a lot of people and translate those ideas I have had for many years into something that maybe makes us a little bit stronger. 

I have never seen a bad ETEN. And I can not even think of an ECO about whom I think, “Ew, I do not like this person…”. They generally are just good people. I think that is because so many of us are into Internationalisation. We all have those little stories about how internationalisation became a part of our lives. We have been trained, either personally or professionally, to think of the world as a big connected and interconnected place where we can make really powerful connections with people. Until you have this experience it is very easy to say, “I do not have anything in common with that person” or “I do not want to know anything about that country.”  That is not the mindset of ETEN. We want to share our cultures, for god or bad. And sometimes that means we have tough conversations.

MO: Thanks a lot! Look forward to meet you in Hasselt and Fort Worth 2025!

Categories: Portraits