32 research outputs found
Reforms to strengthen Moral Education in Japan: a preliminary analysis of implementation in schools
Get PDFThe file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI linkThis study examines the role of educational practitioners in mediating the implementation of the 2015 reforms of moral education. The revision of the Fundamental Law of Education and further commitment to a nationalistic agenda by successive governments have paved the way for curriculum reforms that introduced the value of patriotism as an objective in the moral education curriculum. The reforms in 2015 reassigned moral education as a ‘special subject’ requiring both ministerial approval of textbooks and assessment. However, previous studies have focused almost exclusively on policy and curriculum analyses. Few studies have examined the school or classroom to understand practice as implemented. Challenging the assumption that these revised documents describe changes in practice, this study examines the early stages of the implementation of policy, which is invariably mediated by education practitioners ‘enacting’ policy. Despite the undeniable trend of central policy promoting a ‘love of country’ and efforts to increase state control of education, a stronger patriotism in moral education may not soon materialise in the classroom under the current pace of reform, though structural changes may have longer term potential to limit the autonomy of teachers to mediate policy implementation. The results contribute to our understanding of how these reforms are being implemented, and more broadly how teachers in Japan enact reform ‘on the ground’
The Glocal Contribution of Schools to ESD: Who decides?
No full textThe school is charged with multiple and often-conflicting purposes. These purposes change and diverge through time, between regions and within regions. This discussion considers the various types of contributions made by schools to sustainable society, and how they are shaped by national and international governmental bodies, business interests, popular thought, and parental opinion. We will consider: are schools for academic, physical or moral knowledge? Should schools offer the same education for all students? Which bodies influence schools the most and how? How do global affairs shape the local context, and how can the local context make global change
Review of Moral Education in Japan: Values in a global context
No full textThe file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version
Practitioner advocates in Japan: bringing in knowledge of practice for policy translation
No full textThe research was undertaken as a member of the School Improvement and Policy Studies Research Group, Graduate School of Education, University of Tokyo.
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper examines mechanisms in the Japanese education system that ‘bring in’ knowledge of practice to the process of policy translation. The paper firstly draws on the enactment of recent curriculum reforms in Japan to define a group of actors – practitioner advocates – who utilise their identity as members of the teaching community to mediate and translate policies, from a position outside the school and often outside the municipality. Their collaboration with school administrators and teachers effectuates policy transactions that make sense to teachers, developed in reference to knowledge of practice but legitimised in reference to policy, bending its meanings. Secondly, examining the work of practitioner advocates invites questions that might otherwise go unasked, and provides a fresh perspective on the particularity of the Anglo-American context. It draws attention to the possibility that the Anglo-American structural, institutional or cultural context is peculiarly susceptible to a kind of deliverological managerialism that shuts out experience of practice
Moral Education at Japan elementary school: understanding practice / accommodating policy
No full textReport on a Dataset of Bibliographic Information on Teaching Materials Published in Elementary and Junior High dōtoku Textbooks and Coursebooks, 1992-2023
No full text2015年に道徳教育の強化を目的に学習指導要領が改訂されて以来，道徳教育に対する学術的関心が高まっている。しかしこれらの研究は，教科書の分析に依るところが大きい。教科書は学校の道徳に影響を与えうる複雑で重要な部分であるとされているが，先行研究の多くはその論点や問題が限定されており，時間の経過による変化を考慮していない傾向がある。政策の意図を分析する研究の多くも，学習指導要領と教科書の関係を示す複雑な関係，具体的には文部科学省，教科書の出版者，政策起業家と教育実践者との関係を見落としている。更に，時間の経過による変化を考慮していない。本稿では、こうした実情をふまえて，平成初期から今日までに出版された副読本や教科書に掲載された道徳教材の書誌情報をデータベースとして作成し，報告である。このデータベースは，教科書のより包括的な分析をサポートするための基礎となる。 2017，2018年に道徳の教科書が文部科学省の審査の対象となった当時の傾向変化の方向性と速度について，また，教科書の起源，継続，革新の問題に焦点をあてる。そのうえで，教科書出版社の編集過程に影響する他の利害関係者の役割に関する研究の一助となることを期待する。
Since the revision of the curriculum to strengthen moral education in 2015, there has been an increase in scholarly interest in moral education. One strand of this research relies heavily on textbook analysis. Whilst textbooks are an important part of the complex environment that influences the outcomes of moral education in the school, much textbook analysis has been limited to the role of ‘the government’ in a few contentious issues in response to a new edition. The work of other actors in the Ministry of Education, textbook publishers, policy entrepreneurs and practitioners who contribute to textbook editing and authorship is regularly overlooked, as is change through time. This paper reports on the compilation of a database that contains bibliographic information on moral education materials published in coursebooks and textbooks from the beginning of the Heisei period until today. This resource may provide infrastructure to support more comprehensive analyses of textbooks through time to shed light on questions of the origins, continuation and innovation in dōtoku materials; on the direction and speed of change; and on any changes in trends when dōtoku textbooks became subject to ministerial screening in 2017/18 (or in the years leading up to this date). It may also support further research on the role of textbook publishers in relation to other actors and stakeholders
