Divs-poole

REFORM OF JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION 

Holliday’s (1999) proposal of a “small culture” model is one pertinent approach to 

analyzing social factors in language teaching in a more situationally specific 

manner. Many of the practical challenges to the adoption in Asia of a “strong” 

version of communicative language teaching methodology (Howatt 1984) are not 

terribly different from the challenges that exist in the west, as Holliday (1994) has 

pointed out in his TESEP model mentioned above.  

CURRICULUM REFORM—LITERACY AND KYŌIKU SYSTEM 

Moving from a macroanalysis of reform within one discipline in Japan—ELT—to 

a more micro-examination of reform of the curriculum at one institution—EUC—it 

is important to state at the outset that traditionally each professor at the majority of 

the private and public colleges and universities throughout Japan has had nearly 

total autonomy in teaching. In most cases individual faculty members decide what 

and how they will teach, set their own syllabus, teach the course, design their own 

exams, and then mark the exams and assign grades. Until very recently there has 

been no external assessment of teaching, let alone formal discussion among 

professors within a department. Usually this is very surprising to colleagues 

involved in HE institutions in North America, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. 

Given this precedent, then, there appears to be two basic models regarding reform 

of the curriculum and faculty at private universities (Goodman, personal 

communication). Many university presidents are asking whether they will 1) try to 

reform the practice of the current teaching staff or 2) bypass them altogether 

through the development of programs external to the faculty.  

Many private university administrators and presidents have taken this second 

path and given up trying to reform a recalcitrant staff disinterested in reforming 

their practice and bent on maintaining an autonomy that was granted to them as 

part of the academic freedom instituted in postwar Japan, a process well 

documented in work by historian Byron Marshall (1994). Reformers frustrated 

with professors who think their only role is that of researcher have in some 

institutions openly given up on changing these faculty members into teachers. 

Instead, these administrators are working hard to develop extracurricular projects 

to recruit and retain students, developing a sort of “practical university” of 

credentialism—extension programs, international exchanges, and certification 

courses—that exists on the same campus alongside the more traditional “academic 

university” (Goodman, personal communication). Faced with a shrinking student 

base, Japanese universities are increasingly in search of new markets into which 

they expand, often competing directly with vocational colleges for working 

students who also hold jobs (shakaijin). 

However, a few private universities have decided to reform the teaching at the 

academic university by encouraging faculty to reform the curriculum, improve and 

update their syllabuses, evaluate their own teaching, and take seriously the 

students’ academic and personal concerns ( Musselwhite 2003). This is the case at 

EUC. 

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CHAPTER 2 

58

 

EUC appears to be focusing its survival efforts predominately on the first of the 

two routes outlined above—reforming the curriculum. Although much of the 

discussion of FD and curriculum change is just that, discussion, there has been 

some real change in an attempt to rectify the problems facing HE. I observed 

curriculum changes largely in three areas: 1) the institution of a quasisemester 

system; 2) standardization of the syllabuses for the core curriculum, especially the 

first-year seminar (zemi ichi; homeroom and freshmen orientation) and foreign 

language courses; and 3) review of the study abroad and international students 

programs. All of these changes challenge the commitment of professors to the 

pedagogical process. This section will both detail these changes themselves as well 

as the debates that surround them.  

The Schoolwide EUC Curriculum 

The undergraduate division at EUC, which comprises over 95 percent of 

enrollment, is divided into eight courses of study, four each in the two faculties—

Faculty of Commerce  (shōgakubu) and Faculty of Management (kei’eigakubu). 

Students apply to, sit exams for, and are accepted into one or the other faculty. 

Usually undergraduates decide their own course of study (major) during or after 

their first year at EUC. In the Faculty of Commerce, students can choose between 

the marketing  course, finance course, accounting course, and consumer science 

course. The Faculty of Management offers four different majors—the business 

management course, the business communication course, the entrepreneurship 

course, and the management environment course. Additionally, there are teacher 

education classes, along with a student teaching practicum component, required by 

those students who wish to gain a teaching license to teach either social studies at 

junior high schools or commerce, geography and history, civics, or information 

science at high schools. 

All students in both faculties, and in all eight courses of study, are required to 

take five of the same compulsory classes in their first year—first-year seminar 

(zemi ichi), bookkeeping, basic computing, and English as a Foreign Language A 

& B  (ECA & ECB). In addition, there are a number of required electives to be 

chosen from different clusters in the liberal arts and business fields, and the 

remaining credits for graduation are comprised of required classes for the 

individual majors, as well as elective classes chosen according to individual 

interest. 

Curriculum Reforms 

Between 1998 and 2005 the foreign language and first-year seminar curriculum 

underwent substantial changes. These changes initially focused on 1) better 

integrating the curriculum and 2) streaming or tracking the students according to 

level, in the case of the language program, and interest, in the case of the first-year 

seminar. These reforms are not insignificant if one considers the fact that 1) 

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