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ABSTRACT
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.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the award of a MEXT Research Scholarship (2018). I am grateful to Prof Masaaki Katsuno and other members of the School Improvement and Policy Studies Research Group at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Education, and to two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. Deficiencies remain due to the author's inadequate responses to their insightful comments.
Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘Moral education’ is used as a gloss for the Japanese term dōtoku. In everyday usage, educational discourse and in the curriculum dōtoku has multiple meanings, particularly as (a) a set of educational objectives in the moral domain or (b) as a period of classtime (before 2018/19) or a designated school subject (from 2018/19 onward) (see Bamkin Citation2020). The target of reform was mainly the classtime, one lesson per week which became a designated subject. These ambiguities are overlooked in the current article on policy enactment.
2. ‘Coursebook’ refers to such materials which are freely published; whereas ‘textbook’ in the modern sense refers to a limited range of privately published textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education, one of which must be selected for each designated subject.
3. For education administration, Japan is divided into 67 prefecture-level boards of education. Of these, 47 are prefectures which span large regions with both urban and rural areas; 20 are newly created large city boards, which are independent of the board of their surrounding prefecture. Each prefecture is divided into municipalities, of which there are about 1,700 in Japan. Each municipality has a board of education with fewer powers. The prefecture-level boards exercise greater power.
4. Continued professional development providers; outsourced in-service teacher training.
5. Bamkin (Citation2019: 254–5) similarly analyses practitioner books in Japan, which legitimise their advocacy through particular interpretations of policy.
6. I am grateful to one anonymous reviewer of this article for bringing this article to my attention. Reference to Takayama and Lingard’s work has both enriched this article, and revealed weaknesses in my study.
7. Space precludes discussion of these systems. Examples include the council (primarily shingikai) system for policymaking (see Schwartz Citation1998), including on the curriculum subcommittee and on the textbook approval panels. Consultation on Curriculum Guidelines is discussed in the following paragraph.
8. This paper does not aim to consider the outcomes of this reform. Following these translations into the classroom would require a narrower study embedded more deeply in the domestic context.