Jason Goulah

As Advisor to the Ikeda Center, Jason provides guidance on programs and publications and helps develop strategies to advance the Ikeda Center’s mission. He is Professor of Bilingual-Bicultural Education and Director of the Institute for Daisaku Ikeda Studies in Education at DePaul University in Chicago. He is also director of programs in Bilingual-Bicultural Education, Value-Creating Education for Global Citizenship, and World Language Education at DePaul. Dr. Goulah’s research interests include transformative language learning; Ikeda/Soka studies in education; and language, culture, identity, and socioecological literacies. His scholarship has appeared in multiple edited volumes and scholarly journals. His books include Daisaku Ikeda, Language and Education, which received the 2015 Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association. He also co-edited, with Isabel Nunez, Hope and Joy in Education: Engaging Daisaku Ikeda Across Curriculum and Context, which won a 2022 Society of Professors of Education: Outstanding Book Award.

In a 2013 reflection on our second core conviction Jason explained how Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy inspires his own approach to “human education.”

In his 1993 speech, Radicalism Reconsidered, Mr. Ikeda asserts that we are born human only in a biological sense; we must learn and train—educate—ourselves in the ways of being and becoming human. Emphasis on continually becoming is key in his understanding of human education. It is the process he calls “human revolution.” Moreover, there is no defined telos, no model of being “human” toward which all should strive; rather, each individual should seek to improve and expand in his or her own way, as they are, the inherent qualities that make us human.