Development of the GeoCapabilities project in Japan: furthering international debate on the GeoCapabilities approach

Abstract

In this paper, in the interests of international debate, we introduce a Japan version of the GeoCapabilities project. In Japan, the current revision of the National Curriculum indicates that Geography will again become a compulsory subject in senior high schools. However, some unfavourable situations for the new compulsory subject still remain: such as the continuing shortage of geography specialist teachers. The GeoCapabilities approach can respond in new way to the situations facing Japanese geography education. The Japanese GeoCapabilities team was established in 2016, including teacher educators and teachers. Teachers themselves cooperate with teacher educators to create vignettes that involve “powerful disciplinary knowledge” (PDK). The project encourages teachers to embrace their role as the curriculum makers.

Keywords:

• Curriculum making
• educational reform
• GeoCapabilities
• geography teachers
• powerful disciplinary knowledge (PDK)

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the many educators and teachers who cooperated with the Japanese GeoCapabilities project in many ways. We would also like to express our very great appreciation to Professor David Lambert for his useful and constructive recommendations on this article. JPS KAKENHI, Grant Number 17H02695 supported a portion of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See: www.geocapabilities.org

2 As a background to educational history related to this, Japanese education and research is largely influenced by German pedagogy from the late 19th century. It can be said that there is a culture like ‘Didactics’ among school teachers in Japan today (Tanaka, Nishioka, & Ishii, 2017; Westbury, Hopmann, & Riquarts, 2010). It is most interesting that the European traditions of didactics are increasingly seen by the GeoCapabilities project as very similar to the Anglo-American concept of practical curriculum making (Uhlenwinkel, Béneker, Bladh, Tani, & Lambert, 2017).

3 Asakawa reports some statistics about the Geography and History area. For example, the textbook supply ratios show that the figure for Geography comes to about one-half that of World History. In addition, when 8 teachers for World History and 14 teachers for Japanese History were hired in Saitama Prefecture from 2006 to 2010, teachers of Geography numbered only three (see Asakawa, 2015).

4 According to the social constructivism underpinning Future 2, knowledge is seen as “constructed” in response to particular needs and interests. It means also that there is no “better knowledge,” because valid knowledge is “constructed” by the knower. As a result, in the “Future 2” scenario while the activities involved in learning tend to be overemphasized, the stability of subject concepts is underemphasized (Young et al., 2014, p.68).

5 We translated the English version into Japanese. The English version can be found via the GeoCapabilities site: http://www.geocapabilities.org/training-materials/module-1-the-capabilities-approach/into-practice/

6 Higuchi, K. (2017). KH Coder (version 3.0). It can be downloaded from http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/

7 理解 is a noun, but by adding “suru (する)” is formed a verb(理解する)。