The Role of Primary School Morals
in Establishing Japan’s Education Order Period (1879–1880):
Analysis of Discussions in Japan’s Senate
Takeshi OKUNO
This paper aims to clarify the actual arguments made pertaining to primary school morals in relation to the establishment of Japan s Education Order period (1879–1880) by analyzing the Notes on Japan s Senate Conferences.
Analysis of this paper reveals that Sano Tsunetami, who insisted that morals should be positioned as the foremost of all primary school subjects, suggested a plethora of amendments, thereby obstructing the proceedings. This gave rise to ill feelings among other members of the Senate.
Furthermore, this paper clarifies that Senate members did not view morals as a means of cultivating patriotism when Sano made his proposal. They saw primary school morals as a subject that would help children to learn social manners or as a forum for sharing stories of people with good behavior and moving stories. As a result, Tanaka Fujimaro (the then State Education Secretary) stated:
In short, morals should be taught at home. Other participants in the proceedings mentioned that it was not necessary to position morals as the foremost subject.
This paper also reveals that of the four conference members (which included Sano himself), three who had supported Sano s proposal the previous year were absent. Because an amendment to the provision on primary school subjects was discussed in December 1880, it was difficult for Itami Shigekata (the only attendee) to suggest that morals be positioned as the foremost primary school subject again.
Finally, this paper reveals that assembly members discussed the necessity for cultivating patriotism at the conference held in December 1880. Rather than discussing the positioning of morals in discussions about primary school subjects such as geography, history, and the martial arts, they instead discussed the need to cultivate patriotism.
Department-Based Faculty Development and Peer Collaboration:
Developing a preparatory course for English majors
Mamiko ORII, Issei WAKE In this paper, we discuss the conducting of faculty development (FD) for the creation of a preparatory course for English major students that is based on university-level content and language integrated learning (CLIL). We first explain that longitudinal department-based FD programs that feature peer collaboration can lead to improvements in teaching competence, which may in turn result in improved student learning. We further argue that successful FD programs should begin with the acquisition of data related to student learning (such as student evaluations), which can be used to provide feedback on teaching and improving program curricula. We then discuss the FD programs that were administered during the course s development, during the semester, and after the course had been taught. These included the following:
(1) Formal FD, which was conducted in the form of departmentally administered seminars during the course s development;
(2) Group meetings, which were held during preparations for the new course and throughout the semester to discuss the problems that instructors faced when teaching the course;
(3) Student evaluations, which were conducted at the end of the semester to ascertain student responses to the teaching of the course. In the evaluations, we observed significant differences between classes, especially in terms of how lecturers conducted their classes when teaching language skills and how much feedback they provided to support the students learning;
(4) Reflection papers, which were employed at the end of the academic year to encourage instructors to reflect on their teaching practices;
(5) Peer collaboration, which was conducted by exchanging the reflection papers.
Finally, we argue for the need for continued FD to improve teaching content and provide uniformity in the quality of teaching across classes.
Study on a Japanese Local Cultural Movement of the 1980s:
Focusing on the Kitakyushu and Aichi Fudan-gi Groups
Kentaro KAWAHARA This paper describes a study on the regional Fudan-gi groups that became active in the 1980s.
This development resonated with the philosophy of the Japanese writing practice known as Fudan- gi that Yoshio Hashimoto (1902–1985), a practitioner from Hachioji (located in the western part of Tokyo), started in Hachioji in the latter half of the 1960s.
Fudan-gi is the practice of freely writing and reading aloud texts on matters such as the writer s personal history.
Many different types of cultural movements have arisen in a variety of places throughout Japan, but the kind of persistence that this rural cultural movement has exhibited in the 70 years since World War 2 has been influenced by the postwar history of Japan s education system. Consequently, this movement seems to be an important phenomenon to consider.
However, due to the number of years that have passed since the end of World War 2 and the fact that a variety of practices, such as the learning activities of youth groups and women, are applicable in addition to the writing practices that this study addresses, uncovering all of the relevant information on post-war cultural movements is not easy.
In light of this, my research looks at regional Fudan-gi groups that engage in the practice of Fudan-gi in various locations outside of Hachioji, with a particular focus on the Kitakyushu and Aichi groups that were created after the 1980s.
In this paper, I aim to clarify the significance of Fudan-gi activities while describing the practices of the Kitakyushu and Aichi Fudan-gi groups.
In the course of my research, I cover the following: 1. an overview of the regional Fudan-gi groups; 2. the Kitakyushu group; 3. the Aichi group; and 4. the significance of the activities of the regional Fudan-gi groups.
An Investigation into Attitudes Towards English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in English-medium Instruction (EMI) and Business Settings and its Implications
for English Language Pedagogy
Kumiko MURATA, Mayu KONAKAHARA, Masakazu IINO and Noboru TOYOSHIMA This paper aims at investigating students and business people s attitudes towards English in English-medium instruction (EMI) and business settings from the perspective of English as a lingua franca (ELF). With the acceleration of globalization, the use of ELF among people from diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds is omnipresent, particularly in higher education and business contexts.
The Japanese government increasingly promotes EMI, aiming to internationalize universities by attracting more international students as well as to make Japanese students global human resources.
Under these circumstances, our research conducted in 2015 revealed that the E of EMI does not necessarily match the reality of English in the globalized world, it being frequently associated with ENL (English as a native language), but not ELF (Murata, Iino and Konakahara 2017). The present research therefore further explored the status of ELF in the globalized world by scrutinizing university students and business people s attitudes towards English in the respective contexts from an ELF perspective. Online questionnaires, which mainly consisted of open-ended questions, were administered to the two types of respondents. The data were analyzed qualitatively for their content, and 1) students attitudes towards EMI and 2) students and business people s attitudes towards English were explored. The analysis has revealed certain changes in the attitudes of student respondents in the Department of English Language and Literature, where there has been an increase in the number of EMI classes since the academic year of 2016. Many of the students have shown appreciation for having more opportunities for using English. On the other hand, the business people respondents have shown more ELF-oriented attitudes towards English than the students, although there seem to be certain generation and/or education gaps in their attitudes. Furthermore, younger generation business people seem to shift their attitudes to more ELF-oriented ones through ELF experience in actual business scenes. Lastly, pedagogical implications of the present findings will be discussed.
A Comparative Study on National Language Education Curriculums in Japan and China:
Focusing on Chinese Classic Poems in Textbooks
Kyoko HAYASHI In 2017, Japan s Government Curriculum Guidelines for Elementary and Lower Secondary Schools were revised. One of the major objectives of this revision was to improve classroom teaching and promote creative, interactive, and deep learning. In consideration of this revision, this paper aims to undertake a study of Chinese classic literature teaching̶particularly classic poetry teaching̶in order to identify measures for improving classroom teaching in Chinese classic literature in Japan.
This paper is divided into two chapters. In Chapter 1, we provide an overview of changes in educational policies in Japan and China. In China, the country s Educational Principles have been revised and replaced by the Curriculum Standards with a view to transitioning from knowledge- cramming education to personality-centered education. Meanwhile, the Japanese government is also working to improve classroom teaching with the aim of promoting learner-centered education through its current revision of the Curriculum Guidelines. It is also interesting to note that despite changing circumstances, both countries emphasize the importance of passing down traditional language culture through these revisions.
In Chapter 2, we compare and analyze the learning content and teaching methods employed in the national language education of Japan and China by focusing on Chinese poems in textbooks.
To this end, we examined Chinese classic poems that are commonly included in textbooks in both countries and compiled a list of such poems. We also studied which Chinese classic poems are included in more than one textbook in Japanese elementary and secondary education. Our survey revealed that a total of 31 Chinese poems are commonly included in textbooks in both countries, which is a comparatively small number considering that 181 poems are included altogether in Chinese textbooks. This is likely to be because Chinese textbooks include many Song dynasty poems, while Japanese textbooks include mainly Tang dynasty poems, such as those by Li Bo and Du Fu.
Furthermore, in Chinese textbooks, classic poems and lyrics are written horizontally and with Chinese punctuation marks. As a result, they appear different to the lyrics found in Japanese textbooks.
In elementary education in China, classic poems are presumably used as not only teaching materials for education in the classics, but also materials for mandarin education as well as for literary education
Effects of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) in Comparative Education Analysis:
Focusing on “Articulation” between Schools in Secondary Education
Shigekazu YOSHIDA, Hiroki SATO
The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) is an international statistical framework developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). One of its main purposes is to facilitate cross-national comparisons in the field of education. However, not enough comparative education analyses have been performed using ISCED in the field of comparative education research, which often utilizes cross-national comparisons. In view of the above, this paper examines how students advance from lower secondary education to upper secondary education in the Netherlands and Denmark and then experimentally performs comparative education analyses of these two cases to consider how such analyses should be performed.
In other words, the objective of this study is to explore the feasibility of comparative education research using ISCED2011 while experimentally performing comparative education analyses on two countries. This study verified the importance of ISCED and its potential as an indicator used in comparative education research and provided a clue as to how the methodology for comparative education analysis can be deepened. This clue suggests that certain internal events that are indicated in traditional comparative education research as terms based on the context of each country or region can be indicated as codes that have been agreed upon as international statistics. Assuming that the countries being compared must be juxtaposed when conducting comparative education research, these results demonstrate the significance of using ISCED to visualize some of the realities of the countries being studied as common codes.
Research into the Characteristics of Japanese Women’s University Education after World War II:
Focusing on its Establishment and Present Status
Tsugiyoshi YUKAWA, Takeshi YAMAMOTO, Mika SUGIYAMA This report is one of the research findings of Women s Universities Coordinates within Japanese University Education after World War II, which was research by the general task force in the 2015 and 2016 academic years at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Education of Waseda University.
Women s university education was systematically established during the education reform period after World War II for the first time, and one of the historical characteristics thereof is that co- education and single-gender education were formed in a collateral way. From today s perspective, in terms of co-education university education, it is said that gender equality aspects were insufficient, and subsequently the meaning of the existence of women s universities has been called into question, while it has been pointed that the number of applicants to such universities has been decreasing.
But, in the first place, how were women s universities were established against this background, what kind of women were educated at such institutions, and what type of education and research did staff endeavor to perform there? In this sense, it is very important to research into the background to the establishment of women s universities, their principles, and organizational characteristics of department and disciplinary faculty up until about 1950 for the purpose of considering the women s universities of today.
Additionally, what is the status of today s women s universities? That is to say, what kind of women are being currently educated in women s universities? Moreover, after 1990, the number of co-education universities has been increasing; what is the background to co-education and what is its reality? In the course of research into current women s universities, the meaning of their existence must come under review.
The task force s research focuses on the history and present status of women s universities from many different perspectives, but this report has been compiled as the interim report and consists of three sections. The first section is compiled with regard to the status of co-education and single- gender education at newly established universities and analyzes the logic, educational purpose, etc. of the establishment of women s universities, education purpose, etc., and makes it clear that women s
Study on Preliminary Learning for Flipped Classroom Teaching and Its Application in High School Mathematics
Masamitsu NARUSE This paper undertakes a study of preliminary learning approaches for flipped classroom teaching.
These approaches were developed using Ryan & Deci s Self-Determination Theory (2000) about internal and external motivation. Based on their argument, we implemented flipped classroom teaching in high school mathematics through two approaches: a just-in-time teaching approach and an approach that measures the degree of understanding using short tests. Our aim was to compare the percentages of students who practice preliminary learning and their motivation.
Our study revealed no statistically significant difference between the two approaches in terms of the percentages of students who practiced preliminary learning. Neither was there any clear difference in terms of motivation. Nevertheless, in this study, we were able to formulate guidelines for designing effective flipped classrooms based on the three needs identified in Ryan & Deci s theory by a detailed analysis of the results of our student questionnaire survey.
