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Purpose: As UN's sustainable development goals (SDGs) are integrated across Asia-Pacific Higher Education Institutes (HEIs), the purpose of this descriptive and exploratory study is to investigate undergraduates' own self-stated commitment to the SDGs and their perceived feasibility by the 2030 target. Design/methodology/approach: A mixed-methodology approach covered quantitative and qualitative approaches facilitated by purposive selection of an Asia-Pacific HEI via a Japanese liberal arts college where a questionnaire survey was administered in Autumn 2021. Responses were monitored from freshmen students in twin courses within the same major (introduction to "Environment" and "Development" studies, respectively; "n" = 177) that both integrated SDGs within their respective curricula. Findings: Students in both classes rated the SDGs as a useful learning tool but were sceptical of their feasibility by 2030. A self-stated commitment was high, especially among environment studies students. Multiple regression was run to predict SDGs commitment from gender, major, perceived SDGs' usefulness and feasibility. These variables partially predicted SDGs commitment but only gender and major variables added statistical significance. Moreover, the same variables were less equivocal in terms of predicting the self-stated belief that the SDGs could be achieved by 2030. Practical implications: The findings can inform instructors of students' perceptions towards SDGs. Significant differences raise academic and applied discussion points, such as how to engage male students, for example, by setting up sustainability "business case" practicums. Originality/value: As global HEIs grapple with effective ways to vertically integrate SDGs into a university's curriculum, students' opinions are often underrepresented. This paper's originality and value address these gaps by exploring a holistic student-centric perspective on SDGs in the context of commitment. This paper also has implications for more effective cross-curricula integration of the SDGs.

Inequality and injustice in education have been viewed from the perspective of social justice. Since the emergence of John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice," social justice issues have attracted the attention of social and political philosophers. Theoretical consequences of social and political philosophy have been actively incorporated into the field of education. However, the issue of educational justice remains controversial and requires further philosophical consideration. To further philosophical consideration, this paper explores how the class or the classroom can generate space and time for democracy, by focusing on the educational specificity of the classroom community, which is called 'Gakkyu' in Japanese. Social justice in education is not only a policy issue, but also a practical issue which should be tackled in the classroom. Rethinking the ways of democracy to face conflicts arising due to differences and equality of children in the classroom is an important method of bridging social justice and education. In this paper, the following question will be explored: how classroom democracy can be nurtured and the classroom community transformed into a democratic place where children from various background and experiences gather and learn from each other.

Purpose: This paper aims to discuss the significance of teacher authorship ("jissen kiroku") developed during "jugyo kenkyu." Specifically, it explores the structural conditions of "jugyo kenkyu" that enabled the flourishing of "jissen kiroku." Design/methodology/approach: To find how "jissen kiroku" developed in "jugyo kenkyu," this paper settled triad of authors-text-readers as the analytical perspective. Disputes through 1960s-1980s are adequate to inquire because it can elucidate how readers read "jissen kiroku," which is typically challenging to observe. Findings: "Jissen kiroku" is a powerful tool for semantically preserving, reconstructing and consolidating professional values and knowledge in "jugyo kenkyu" with deepening connoisseurship. Voluntary educational research associations (VERAs) encourage teachers to write and read "jissen kiroku" to develop their professionalism, which also helped develop exclusive semantics within the field. These developments were possible due to the public nature of "jissen kiroku," disseminated to lesson study (LS) actors, thereby strengthening discussions both inside and outside VERAs. Research limitations/implications: The paper proposes shift in views on educational science and emphasizes authorship as authority in that professionalism of teaching can be protected and elevated through authoring. Originality/value: The significant roles of writing practice have not been explored enough. This paper finds the value of authorship in terms of public nature and openness to all teachers which enable the enhancement of professionalism of the LS field.

Involving the global issues as listed in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in education is necessarily done in the education process, especially in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning. Exposure to global issues is known to improve students' understanding, awareness, and ability to solve urgent issues faced by global society. This paper aims to find out the trend of research on the coverage of SDGs in students' learning process. This systematic literature analysis was done by applying Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Method. A total of 25 studies were recognized through a systematic search by using Sustainability, SDGs, and EFL as keywords. The result shows that the trend of associating SDGs with EFL settings was done mostly in Indonesia. In the recent year 2022, it reached the highest number of studies in the particular matter with 7 total of research. It was also found that the study involving SDGs on EFL learning was mostly done in the tertiary setting, compared with K-12, junior high school, secondary, high school, and other educational institutions. It was also discovered that the specific area of study enhances EFL students' learning achievement, environmental awareness, global citizen values, as well as students' levels of self-norms, beliefs, and self-value.

This study presents an international collaboration in the Students Meet Internationally through Language Education (SMILE) project and investigates how the SMILE project impacts Thai EFL students. This program provides students with opportunities to use English as an Authentic Communication Tool (E-ACT) by sharing their experiences and culture with high school peers in Japan online. Thirty-one Thai twelfth graders from a public high school in Bangkok participated in the SMILE project in the 2022 academic year. The course of the SMILE project we describe in this paper consisted of four collaboration classes (50 minutes, four times), and each class consisted of two sessions (25 minutes, twice). In each session, the Thai students met Japanese students in the same school grade in small groups with four or five students in total. These classes were conducted via online channels. Thai students' data were collected from class observations, interviews, and questionnaires. The results revealed that the Thai students: (1) increased their confidence in using English; (2) gained broader perspectives from the cultural exchange sessions; (3) were eager to have similar collaborations with new Japanese students; and (4) showed clear enjoyment in their activities. Given these benefits, we conclude that the experience that student participants gained through the SMILE project had a substantial impact on them, which is likely to change their attitude toward studying English in the future. Besides, we discuss how current approaches to learner psychology may or may not be applied to our findings. Based on the results, the authors argue that having students with different first languages meet online should be conducted more widely in EFL circumstances.

Purpose: During Japan's initial pandemic prevention and control period, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan (MEXT) issued several notifications to ensure students' continuous learning according to the "leave no one behind" philosophy. This study focused on the comprehensive measures comprising top-level arrangements to implement the "suspending classes without stopping learning" initiative. Design/Approach/Methods: The study reviewed MEXT's guide on ensuring learning for Japanese primary and secondary school students during the pandemic. Findings: The pandemic has accelerated the development of the information and communications technology educational environment and the implementation of the Global and Innovation Gateway for All (GIGA) schools initiative. These developments laid the foundation for the evolution of diverse pedagogical models and feasible methods for promoting equity. The home schooling experience during the pandemic provided a natural base for students to practice and foster survivability. Originality/Value: This paper provides scholars with an understanding of the opportunities and challenges encountered in educational innovation in Japan. It provides insights into the future direction of pedagogical development, capability development, and effective educational arrangements for extraordinary circumstances to facilitate educational development from a broader perspective, particularly under the new normal.

"Assumptions" play a fundamental role in disciplinary mathematical practice, especially concerning the relativity of truth. However, much is still unclear about ways to help students recognize key aspects of this role. In this paper, we propose a set of principles for task design to introduce students to the role of assumptions in mathematical activity, with particular attention to the following two learning goals: recognize that (1) a conclusion depends on the assumption(s) underlying the argument that led to it; and (2) making the underlying assumption(s) explicit is crucial to reaching consensus on the conclusion. In the context of a 3-year design research study, we first used existing literature to construct an initial version of task design principles which we then empirically tested and refined by designing and implementing two tasks in Japanese school classrooms. One of the tasks was in the area of functions at the secondary level and the other in the area of geometry at the elementary level. We analyze two classroom episodes to discuss the promise and evolution of our proposed task design principles. In addition, our analysis sheds light on the role of the teacher's instructional moves and the students' mathematical knowledge during the implementation of the designed tasks.

The fragmentation of academic work and its uneven distribution among academic staff have produced particular challenges for new entrants to teaching in Higher Education, Early Career Teachers [ECTs]. In this paper, documentary analysis of the narratives of fourteen ECTs, who worked across six different continents, was undertaken. The findings highlight the diverse forms of precarity that ECTs face, which cut across migratory, identitarian, economic, and ideological dimensions. It discusses ECTs' reflections on their expectations of teaching and their adaptation to the demands of neoliberal Higher Education. Drawing from their narratives and Sevil Sümer's theories of differentiated academic citizenship, ECTs are recognised as 'precarious academic citizens'. This has important implications for revealing the unique circumstances of this group, thereby opening further questions as regards their mentoring and support to enable them to be situated more equally as citizens of the academy.

The relationship between concepts of 'native-speakerism', English language education and their effects on local stakeholders are continually evolving. As such, this paper critically analysed native-speakerist ideologies in the Japanese EFL teaching context with the aim of illustrating the complicated nature of native-speakerism as it currently exists. The findings of the review show that native-speakerism and associated ideologies can be seen in various aspects of ELT and ELL. Private English language teaching sectors, as well as higher educational institutions appear to employ elements of native-speakerism, such as the native-speaker fallacy, to the detriment of both native speakers and non-native speakers alike.

The flexibility of the Delphi Technique has enabled its application across a wide range of fields to facilitate problem solving, decision-making and consensus-building. However, flexibility brings with it a corresponding lack of detailed methodological guidelines, and the rigour of Delphi studies has been questioned. This paper presents a recent study investigating global competence in Japan to demonstrate how Q-methodology can be integrated into a Delphi study to improve rigour. Using Q-methodology helps to mitigate potential problems associated with (a) consensus parameters and focus, (b) panel retention rates, and (c) feedback design.

Japanese Lesson Study (JLS) is a professional development method, involving teachers collaboratively planning lessons, observing their enactment, then discussing observations of teaching and learning. This paper explores translation of JLS internationally, seeking to understand how and why it is adapted and how an understanding of national culture and implementation paradigms might support translation. We begin by examining evidence on adaptation and challenges of JLS implementation internationally, finding both deviation from the seven components of JLS, and qualitative evidence of perceived challenges to successful implementation. Further we explore two bodies of the literature explaining how and why such adaptations occur. First, implementation science reveals that full fidelity appears not to be amenable to the complexity of education innovations like LS, but that adaptation is fraught with challenges, with no linear pathway. Secondly, Hofstede's and colleagues' dimensions of culture enable us to hypothesise about how Japan's culture might have framed development of JLS, and to predict possible challenges when translated into a host nation. Finally, we hypothesize as to the relationship between adoption of either fidelity or adaptation implementation paradigms, and identified differences between Japan and the host nation's national culture, suggesting avenues for further research which may serve to test hypotheses empirically.

The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children's consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives: the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with disjunctive interpretations in these sentences and assign conjunctive interpretations. The results of our experiment however show that Japanese children can access the disjunctive interpretations when conjunctions are elided. This finding supports the idea that children are guided by the Semantic Subset Principle when determining the default value of any parameter associated with a logical connective.

The purpose of this paper is to (a) establish whether meaning recall and meaning recognition item formats test psychometrically distinct constructs of vocabulary knowledge which measure separate skills, and, if so, (b) determine whether each construct possesses unique properties predictive of L2 reading proficiency. Factor analyses and hierarchical regression were conducted on results derived from the two vocabulary item formats in order to test this hypothesis. The results indicated that although the two-factor model had better fit and meaning recall and meaning recognition can be considered distinct psychometrically, discriminant validity between the two factors is questionable. In hierarchical regression models, meaning recognition knowledge did not make a statistically significant contribution to explaining reading proficiency over meaning recall knowledge. However, when the roles were reversed, meaning recall did make a significant contribution to the model beyond the variance explained by meaning recognition alone. The results suggest that meaning recognition does not tap into unique aspects of vocabulary knowledge and provide empirical support for meaning recall as a superior predictor of reading proficiency for research purposes.

This paper attempts to reinterpret asylum theory (1954) propounded by Ortwin Henssler (1923-2017) as a free-space theory of education, as a way of grasping the problematic nature of 'pedagogical protection.' The theoretical potential of Henssler's thought has been more appreciated, accepted, and developed in Japan than in his native Germany. First, I outline Henssler's theory of asylum and show how his theory has been received and developed in Japan, especially in the fields of historical researches. Secondly, I discuss the possibility of reading Henssler's thought of asylum as a theory of 'pedagogical protection.' Thirdly, I consider whether it is possible to interpret 'free space' in education based on the model of asylum. Finally, I delineate some prospects for and challenges involved in connecting the theory of asylum to the theory of education.

Against the prevailing outcomes-based education and the instrumentalization of education, a movement has arisen towards holistic education. This aims to go beyond objective measurement of the outcomes of education in order to treat the student as a whole person. In this paper, we shall examine some strands of education in Japan which in some way or another feature the idea of the whole person. This includes the tradition of clinical pedagogy, which originated in Kyoto University, Yukichi Shitahodo's educational anthropology ("Kyoiku-Ningengaku"), Kuniyoshi Obara's "Zenjin" Education (the education of the whole person) and holistic education. Notwithstanding the fact that such education is benevolent in intention, it can be miseducative in some respects. In the light of this, and with some reference to criticism of the idea of the whole person, we shall point to an alternative vision of education of the whole person following Cavell's Emersonian moral perfectionism -- a perfectionism that is thoroughly anti-foundationalist and that transcends self-entrapment in circulatory discourse on the whole. In critical dialogue between the rich traditions of Japanese thought and the critical voice of liberalism raised from within the West, we hope to find a more nuanced answer to the question of how being a whole might make sense.

This paper studies the theory and practice of Minna in Manabi, as the Japanese concept of learning from the perspective of moral education. The Japanese word Minna, which means "all" or "everyone," plays an important role in Manabi. The word "Minna" is often found in textbooks used in moral education classes, and great value is placed on "thinking about everyone." Minna, a component of Manabi, not only makes the self (the learner) nothing and selfless, but also makes it possible to enter all, everyone, and the world. This may create possibilities for inclusiveness, reciprocal harmony, hospitality, solidarity, and cooperativeness. This Manabi of "thinking about everyone" can be found in moral classes and in all aspects of learning (educational) activities in Japanese schools. Among them, in addition to being a traditional Buddhist practice dealing with Nothingness and Selflessness, Souji (cleaning time) is also very important in schools as a Japanese moral practice of "thinking about everyone." The moral concepts developed in the West, such as democracy, community, solidarity, engagement, and citizenship, are not only realized through the establishment of the individual, self-realization, and perfection of personality, but by "thinking about everyone," as expressed in Nothingness, Selflessness, and Minna.

Background: This paper analyzes a remembered shared experience of cocurricular designing and coteaching an experiential learning pilot project in a university study abroad program (SAP) that emphasized social justice. Purpose: We look back because the pilot program is a significant demonstration of what complexities can arise when feminist educators bring their own politics and pedagogies to experiential learning and study abroad education contexts; we understand this as valuable because "experience" broadly is complex. Memory is crucial to feminist educators because it indicates the development of care, ethics, pedagogy, politics, and priorities, and so, we ask: what pedagogical insights can be gained through revisiting our enmeshed personal/professional memories of cocurricular designing and coteaching an experiential learning series for study abroad students? Methodology: We use self-study and memory work to analyze memory objects (curriculum materials) and narratives (of teaching) to explore this pedagogical work and highlight generative tensions that emerged while employing a critical feminist approach to work not initially conceptualized with this framing. Findings: We uncovered three key tensions: personal, community, and racial that troubled emergent issues related to difference, discourse, and positionality. Implications: This project offers pedagogical insights into how oppression and inequality may enter experiential learning and study abroad spaces.