Mentor
Call me Dan. My doting father named his first son Daniel Graydon Clapper III. Ok, but please call me Dan – it fits better, and dad won’t mind.
Career
My career is in international education. I have led projects face-to-face in nine countries and virtually in six more. My practice has grown over more than forty years, and through a wide variety of positions. These include roles in ESL teaching and program management, adult and alternative education, business communication training, corporate learning and development, edtech, consulting, and edupreneurship.
I am the founder and owner of Cogent Language, a boutique multinational company, now two decades old. It offers international educators the chance to grow their own project know-how and career impact by reflecting with me on their experience, ideals, and practice.
I am the only mentor at Cogent Language. Most importantly, I am the conscientious student and caring partner of every educator I mentor. You can check out a business-like profile of me on my LinkedIn profile. You may also be interested in my background and culture as a potential mentor on your global career. If so, please let me introduce myself a bit more personally.
Life Story
I grew up in the US Southwest of the 1950’s, on the outskirts of a suburb of Phoenix Arizona. At the time, white folks, like my family, were moving into that suburb. It bordered older Hispanic neighborhoods on one side and big farm fields on the other. As a boy, I played in those fields, ones the Hoover Dam had just begun to provide with water. They were worked mostly by my Hispanic neighbors and by temporary laborers from Mexico under the US/Mexico Bracero Program. In and around those fields, I played among cottonwood trees, kids my age, and the desert. Further away, I got to play catch ball on the reservations of indigenous Apache, Hopi, and Navaho kids, while my dad collected loan repayments from their parents.
When I was twelve, dad moved the family to California, down the peninsula from San Francisco, into the town of Mountain View. There, in the middle of what would soon become “Silicon Valley”, I came of age. I was, in fact, a neighbor of Steve Jobs. We were both lucky enough to grow up around jazzy beatniks, systems engineers, zen beginners, hippies, hackers, eco-topians, the Black Panthers, and entrepreneurs of all stripes.
I got into Stanford University, paying my way through by scholarships. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, I earned advanced degrees in Cybernetic Systems and in Education. Soon after, I began to work in intercultural education and training. I was fortunate enough to land key roles as a young man in some of the top organizations of that new field, including Temple University Japan and World Learning, I led projects in Silicon Valley, Boston, Houston, and Tokyo. By mid-career, I was leading the design of instructional systems in more than a dozen countries, including some in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
In 2004, I was invited by the US Department of Defense and The University of Maryland (UMD) Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) to present on the post-9/11 future of US training in languages and intercultural education.
In 2005, I launched this company, Cogent Language, as a US limited liability company (LLC) under Arizona law. There and then, my main clients were US and Asia Pacific multinational firms. My only offering was pure consulting on global business communication and human resource development.
After a series of successful engagements in Japan, I opened a branch of Cogent Language in Tokyo in 2007. I began working there steadily with Japanese and global companies. While my main stock in trade continued to be advice to decision-makers on human resource development, I also began providing training to employees and coaching to managers on project management.
While demand for these services continued during the Covid pandemic, I became less interested in working with corporations, line managers, HR administrators, executives, and lawyers, amd more interested in serving inidividuals directly, especially those in multicultural and/or international education. Thus, my current business is coaching – enabling education professionals to start where they are and to grow project know-how and global careers, fit to their own realities and ideals.
In 2026, I was recognized as an “Exceptional Mentor” by the US Project Management Institute (PMI) of Phoenix, Arizona. Which is where I founded my company 20 years ago.
And where I used to play, as a glad young boy, in sun-bright fields. With lots of different kids, and infinite other sentient beings.