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The iterative process of ethnography not only constructs theory, but its methodology should embody theory. Developing a theoretical framework often demands adjustments in methodology, to leverage previous work and to avoid assumptions compounding through the magnification of blind spots. New theory in policy-engaged ethnography has emphasised the importance of analysing interactions between teachers. However, such analyses have not yet emerged in research on education in Japan, partly because of enduring conceptualisations of teachers as homogeneous. Methodological tools that do exist are grounded in anglosphere data and remain unsuited to research in Japan's schools. As such, participants are positioned amongst, but not in relation to, other teachers and school administrators. Yet, taking teacher heterogeneity seriously enhances the salience of selection bias. The same teachers who are enthusiastic about participating in the research are often those who are enthusiastic about the topic of the research. What is difficult in school ethnography is procuring, and preferably ensuring, participation from teachers who are not enthusiasts toward the topic of the research. Designing research with both the heterogeneity of teachers and the specifics of the local context in mind can provide more diverse data with potential to inform analyses of micro-politics in Japan's schools. In reference to a five-year research project and grounded in data from Japan, the paper proposes some procedures to access a diverse range of teachers based on a theory developed to conceptualise teachers' orientations towards policy work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education has emerged as a pivotal factor in shaping pedagogical practices and enhancing learning outcomes worldwide. In Japan, the application of ICT in educational settings is marked by significant disparities. This paper aims to explore the multifaceted dimensions of ICT utilization in Japanese education, examining the underlying factors contributing to these disparities, the implications for educational equity, and potential pathways for harmonizing ICT integration across diverse regions. By synthesizing existing literature, this analysis will elucidate the nuanced interplay between technology, pedagogy, and regional contexts, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities inherent in the digital transformation of education in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This longitudinal study examined the effectiveness of a progress monitoring method, namely the Multilayer Instruction Model-Progress Monitoring (MIM-PM), which is a word reading fluency measure. It was used from 1st grade onward to predict the overall reading achievement of students in elementary school by tracking their reading achievement over the following six years. A total of 827 elementary school students in Japan participated in this study. At the end of every other year—2nd, 4th, and 6th grades—a standardized Reading Test (RT) was administered to assess overall reading achievement. The relationship between each MIM-PM measure and RT was determined using the latent growth curve model (LGCM). Using the LGCM, we confirmed that the MIM-PM had an acceptable fit for use in the prediction model for RT from 2nd to 6th grades. The MIM-PM slope explained the intercept of RT, rather than that of MIM-PM. Thus, it can assist in predicting reading achievement in later grades based on word reading fluency, as well as monitor students' progress from an early stage of the educational process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we create a world that will offer our children wisdom, humanity, responsibility and hope? Shinichi Yasutomo, the extraordinary principal of a rural village school in Hokkaido, Japan, passionately believes he knows the way - by giving children a moral compass to guide their lives, by educating their hearts as wells as their minds. Heart of the Country takes time - a full calendar year, to follow the life of this extraordinary man and the families and children he has dedicated himself to. It is also the story of the village of Kanayama, a rural farming community bound together by love for its children and a deep respect for learning. Parents, elders and leaders of this once impoverished town have been tempered by the long journey through the cultural upheaval of postwar Japan. They embrace Principal Yasutomo’s vision of hope for the future, but not without wary glances back to the past. Produced in collaboration with the community of Kanayama, Hokkaido and the Hokkaido University of Education Japan.

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日本の高校の教室では、クラスの人数に関わらず、生徒の座席はあらかじめ指定されており、定 期的に前列から後方へローテーションする方法が一般的であり、この方法は、多くの西洋諸国の教 室でも通例となっている。しかしながら、日本の大学、短大、高専などといった高等教育機関では、 このように国際的にも慣例となっている座席のルールとエチケットとは、極めて対照的な状況を観 察することができる。すなわち、今日多くの日本の大学において、特に日本人教師の担当する授業 の教室では、学生は教師からできるだけ離れた後方の席に座る。多くの大学の教室は、特に古い建 物では、100 人の学生がゆったり座れるほどの広さがあり、しかも１クラスの平均的学生数は15 〜 30 人であるため、その結果生じる空間（隙間・すきま）あるいは「教育的間隙」pedagogical dissonance は極めて顕著であり、より詳細な考察と検討に値する。つまり、この「教育的間隙」 pedagogical dissonance は、まさに「コミュニケーションを阻害するもの」communication decay としてはたらくこと、すなわち教師＝学生間の「教育・学習相互作用」learning transaction　の中 核を蝕むものとなるからこそ、これに注目し研究する意義があると言える。筆者は、このコミュニ ケーション阻害空間こそ、学習環境の中で生じる他の全てのものに悪影響を与える元凶となってい ると論断する。本研究は、この現象を究明するために、二つの枠組みを用いて、教室内の座り方の 重要性を認識するとともに、授業担当者に実践的な手引きを提供することを目指すものである。第 一の枠組みは、分子科学からのもので、分子のグルーピングの性質に基づき、多様な座席のシナリ オに応じて、そのグルーピングが、どのような枝分かれ（網状拡大組織）を持ちうるかを総合的に 理解することを助けてくれる。第二の枠組みは、構造工学からのものであり、強度と結合の観点か ら、学生たちの座り方を解釈することを可能にする。本研究は、試行的予備的研究であり、その最 初の探索であるため、未だ量的データを提示するには至っていないが、この分野における問題の所 在を明らかにし、直接的参与観察の記録を質的データとして示すことを通して、教室環境の改善方 法を提案し、座席の座り方やグルーピングのスタイルがもたらす教育への影響についての学術的研 究を促すことを目的としている. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Education Research (1680-6360) is the property of Angle Publishing Co., Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Curriculum reforms often fail because teachers are asked to implement approaches to teaching and learning that are contrary to their beliefs about students and how to teach them. Since curriculum reforms are attempts to resolve particular educational problems, failures in implementation produce parallel failures to resolve the problem for which the curriculum was the intended solution. We propose an approach to understanding curricula that makes the mismatch between assumptions about teaching and learning in policy and teachers' practice apparent. By describing curricula as theories of action we can explain why teachers persist in teaching as they usually do. Once described, the gap between policy and implementation can be bridged by creatively redesigning the current theories that underpin them. We demonstrate this approach to understanding curricula by describing the espoused and enacted locally designed curriculum of a Japanese junior and senior high school programme and find that teachers' strongly held beliefs about their students constrained them from enacting the active student‐centred approaches they had initially espoused. In so doing, we show how even where there is broad agreement between teachers and policy makers there may be a considerable gap between the curriculum that was intended and that which is enacted in the classroom. By deeply understanding and comparing the assumptions underpinning both curricula, we explain such mismatches and discuss how they might be reduced through creative and principled reformulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilized textual analysis to investigate 27 articles published by Japanese scholars from various disciplines regarding constructivist approaches. The results found that many of the collected articles in this study reported the need for and effectiveness of a constructivist approach in language, STEM, and social sciences education. The most popular topic found in the collected articles related to English language classrooms with 13 of the 27 articles discussing English language classrooms. Only 11 of the 27 articles reported the actual implementation of a constructivist approach, while the other 16 were theoretical papers that asserted the need for and effectiveness of constructivism. These results indicate that constructivist approaches in Japan are still an underdeveloped area. Japanese educators will be required to spend further time and effort to actually implement the approach, especially in STEM and social studies classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions around education for global citizenship continues to retrace notions of cosmopolitanism first laid out in Europe. Ostensibly seeking global inclusivity, much of this work ultimately returns to a rather narrow set of ontological and epistemic themes, primarily Stoicism and Pauline Christianity. The Kyoto School offers a constructive reconstruction of these core premises of European cosmopolitanism. In resisting the ontologizing of autonomous individualism and abstract universalism, Kyoto School thinkers offered an alternative tripartite structure that drew greater attention to the specific (nation-state): individual and universal are inevitably mediated by the 'logic' of specific histories, languages, institutions, and communities. Rather than naïve nationalism, this view emerged within a radically relational worldview: 'continuity-in-discontinuity' emplaced within absolute nothingness. Kimura Motomori, a leading Kyoto School educational thinker, explicitly extended these Nishidian ideas to challenge Rousseau's contracting individualism, Kantian abstract universalism, and Hegelian teleological temporality, thus offering a fresh vision of cosmopolitanism: self-aware citizens engaging concretely in the task of (re)opening their specific societies. In conclusion, in part to demonstrate the very forms of critique we envisage, we trace historically the impacts of Kyoto School cosmopolitanism ideas on postwar policy in Japan and lament the recent regressive closing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kyouzaikenkyuu (translated as instructional materials research) is said to be a crucial part of successful Japanese lesson study. Kyouzaikenkyuu is described as the planning portion of the research lesson during lesson study. Kyouzaikenkyuu is also said to be done on a daily basis by Japanese teachers; however, there is very little written about this process in the literature. This study takes an in-depth look into what Japanese junior high mathematics teachers do during their daily kyouzaikenkyuu, and why they do it. Through interviews, observations, and participation in kyouzaikenkyuu, we explain the process and key ideas that many Japanese mathematics teachers go through to prepare their lessons. We document two different approaches to kyouzaikenkyuu. We also found that for some teachers there is a large difference between what they do during kyouzaikenkyuu for a research lesson compared to the kyouzaikenkyuu of a daily lesson. If teachers outside of Japan wish to engage in kyouzaikenkyuu and lesson study, these approaches are a good place to start. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International comparative studies on mathematics teaching and learning often provide unitary and harmonious images of classroom practices. This paper aims to complement those studies by describing the complex aspects of those practices. Adopting activity theory as a framework, this paper considers classroom teaching and learning of mathematics as an activity system embedded in socio-historical contexts, analyzes its contradictions, and makes a comparative analysis of different practices of mathematics teaching and learning in the same country. As a case in point, mathematics lessons in Japanese secondary schools are considered. The initial activity system of mathematics lessons in Japanese modern schools came from the whole-class instruction system and then gradually evolved into the problem-solving style lesson. The latter has been facing challenges, and then a new activity system has emerged from a new paradigm of school education. It is argued that activity systems analysis enables us to understand the contradictions prevailing in mathematics education and that comparative analysis of more than one system in the same culture can provide valuable insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Education Research (1680-6360) is the property of Angle Publishing Co., Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The number of Japanese language learners in Indonesia has reached second place in the world (The Japan Foundation, 2015). However, Japanese language skills of learners in Indonesia are still very far behind from other countries, especially China and South Korea. Therefore, this study aims to discuss the causes of the lack of development on Japanese language learning abilities in Indonesia with the curriculum approach used. To answer these problems, author analysed data by The Japan Foundation, interviewed Japanese language teachers at one national high school in Bandung, and reviewed the curriculum that was being used. The results showed that most of Japanese language learners in Indonesia are at the secondary education level and mostly are high school students. However, the purpose of the Japanese language teaching curriculum in high schools in Indonesia does not require students to master Japanese to the upper level. Therefore, even though the number of Japanese language learners in Indonesia is large, but because the target of language acquisition is low, the Japanese language ability also tends to be low.

This paper traces the complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in the creation of a new, 'scientific' assessment in what we call Prefecture A in Japan. We start with a thick, granular description of the complicated and ongoing narrative of a new policy emergence. This descriptive account serves as a precursor to our application of an Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach, particularly the concepts of assemblage and assembling, while at the same time eschewing its depoliticising effect of a flat ontology. Our account details that much work and strategising went into achieving the new assessment but also into holding it in place. This included, strategising inside and across the Prefecture, with the National Ministry, with edu-businesses that had psychometric expertise, with politicians and the board of education and with the OECD and the Director of its Education and Skills Directorate. The analysis illustrates the complex, multi-directional and topological cartographies of power that now work in contemporary education policy processes. As such, we suggest a way to transcend the binary of methodological nationalism and methodological globalism evident in much policy sociology in education work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that Japanese education in Turkey began in Sultan Abdulhamid II era for the first time at the Ottoman Military College, in 1891. After this training, which lasted for a short period of two years, one of the students, Lieutenant Mustafa Asım Efendi prepared a dictionary in Turkish-Japanese-French under the name of Mecmua-ı Lügat (ML) in 1893. This study aims to examine the first known Turkish-Japanese dictionary ML within the framework of lexicographical analysis theories and to make a small contribution to the study of Turkish historical lexicography. In the study, first of all, the historical background in the publication of the first foreign language dictionaries of Turkish and Japanese was described briefly, and then in the review part, the basic structures in ML were discussed. The most important finding of the study is that the writing direction affecting the macrostructure in Turkish historical dictionaries has never been discussed before. Since this study is the first lexicographical analysis on ML, it is thought that it will contribute to the field of Japanese lexicography as well as to the field of Turkish lexicography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Chung Cheng Educational Studies is the property of Chung Cheng University, College of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

European theorists of childhood still tend to locate the first positive acknowledgements of childhood as a human developmental period in its own positive right between the 16th and 18th century in Europe. Even though the findings of Ariès have been constantly challenged, it still remains a commonplace, especially within the history of education, to refer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the 18th century as one of the earliest and most prominent conceptualisers of childhood as a positive period that must not be evaluated in the light of its distance to adulthood but for its inherent value as an important and unmissable period of human life. Such a view is as unhistorical as it is biased and eurocentred. This article endeavours to shed at least a small light on the history of education and of childhood outwith the usual focus. The central objects of examination are the theoretical treatises of Zeami Motokiyo regarding the Noh theatre which have long been recognised as one of the great cultural achievements of humankind. Despite their acknowledged importance, theorists of education have hardly engaged with these treatises even though they present us with a whole theory of education that also embraces a very original and positive theory of childhood. Given that the treatises originate from the 14th-early 15th century, they pre-date everything the typical Western History of Education would bring forth as the beginning of a positive childhood and a pedagogy that acts accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

中國教育西化始於晚清，而壬寅及癸卯學制則是創始，主要仿日。制定過程中，過去許多研究認為吳汝綸是主要影響人物之一，他在就任京師大學堂總教習前獲派赴日考察教育4個月，透過參觀、訪談、聽講及資料蒐集，希望全面深入瞭解日本教育的發展與問題。訪問結果除即時陳報管學大臣張百熙及相關人員外，另出版《東遊叢錄》供修訂癸卯學制參考。但經本研究再考察發現，因人在日本考察、返國後朝局不利及病逝等因素，故他未能直接參與規劃、引導方向，以致主政人員在設計學制時，仍只是複製日本制度而已。 The modernization of Chinese education began from the late Ch’ing period, and the 1902 Ren-yin and 1904 Kuei-mao school systems marked the beginning of the modernization of Chinese education, which borrowed from Japanese education. Numerous studies have claimed that master Ju-Lun Wu was one of the key figures, before he inaugurated the vice-chancellor of Imperial Capital University, who inspected Japanese education over 4 months. He inquired into the development and problems of Japanese education by inspecting schools and universities; discussing with scholars, educators, and officials; listening to lectures; and collecting materials. His findings were reported to Minister Pai-Shi Chang and related staff and his Collected Records of Visiting Japan was published. Although his book became a reference book, this study found that Ju-Lun Wu was not directly involved in drafting school systems for several reasons. Therefore, the 1904 Kuei-mao system remains an uncritical, imitated Japanese school system.