Professional development through kizuki – cognitive, emotional, and collegial awareness

Abstract

The author traced an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher’s professional development by examining her narrative and identifying the transformation of her awareness or kizuki. Kizuki, which is unique to Japanese culture, implies a sudden feeling of inner understanding of a phenomenon and can be roughly translated as ‘becoming aware of’, ‘noticing’ or ‘realizing’. To show how powerful and important the concept is for teacher development in the Japanese context, the author studied team‐taught project‐based EFL learning in a Japanese junior high school for nine months. A qualitative analysis of the teacher’s narrative highlights that different types of her kizuki – cognitive, emotional, and collegial – were generated and its transformative power enabled her to gain ownership of teacher learning, which it is hoped would lead to professional development. Moreover, an analysis of students’ narratives clarified that they also gained kizuki and ownership over their learning in their supportive classroom community.

Keywords:

• teachers’ awareness
• teacher learning
• narrative
• classroom life
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Associate Professor Tatsuhiro Yoshida, my seminar supervisor, for heartfelt guidance and sincere encouragement. I am also grateful to Dr Karen E. Johnson of the Pennsylvania State University, USA and Dr Viljo Kohonen of the University of Tampere, Finland. My most heartfelt thanks go to my partner teacher, Yukiko Nishiyama, and the students who participated in this study. I would also like to thank Mr Bashir Wilaity Mohammed for visiting our language classroom and talking to the students about recent situations and school children in his country, Afghanistan. Last but not least, I would like to express my deep appreciation to my family, who supported and encouraged me throughout these past two years.