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REFORM OF JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION president saw the semester system as a way of forcing students to attend more classes and generally be more involved in classroom education. It is thought that the semester calendar was a first step towards facilitating the standardization of the various course syllabuses by effectively breaking each course into two halves. Overall, the semester system effectively increases the amount of professorial “guidance of students” (gakusei shidō), which supports the ideology of a warm “family-like” educational experience, more than it does the number of classroom contact hours.
As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, there are very few standardized syllabuses among the EUC departments. Most professors are able to teach what, when, and how much they like in terms of course and subject content. With an eye toward reform of teaching practice, however, there were various moves, with varying degrees of success, towards standardizing the courses on offer at EUC. This fit with the EUC ideology of “family-like education” (kazoku kyōiku), as was being advertised in the glossy admissions office bulletins, which holds dear the notion of small classes, first-year seminars, and a core curriculum of computing, bookkeeping, and “communicative English” classes required of all first-years. One of the first steps toward standardization was a presidential purge of the overall university curriculum, at a macro level. With pressure from the board to reduce the number of part-time lecturers in a cost-cutting effort, President Asakubo took a top-down approach to streamlining the curriculum, announcing his moves with much fanfare and posturing at the faculty senate. He deliberately tried to leave little room in which the various departments especially the Liberal Arts Faculty, could maneuver. At the level of the syllabus, the academic affairs committee, with the help of the president and the President’s Office committee, made some reforms to standardize the content of certain classes. The first-year seminar and EC were prime examples. 1 Although both of these courses had been key components in the EUC core curriculum, because there was little coordination, let alone standardization, students taking the same class were getting course credits for wildly different content.
A twentieth anniversary report on the study abroad program at EUC starts with the following introduction: Education of any kind is ideally a broadening experience, one that acquaints us with new ideas, concepts and cultures. The perfect complement to any education is a period of study in another country, where one is immersed in the unfamiliar. An old adage holds that those who “travel much, know 63
CHAPTER 2 much.” The founder of Edo Gakuen, Kawada Tetsuya, urged students to pursue a goal of becoming “peaceful and internationally minded citizens.” Following these words of encouragement, in 1984, eighty years after its establishment, EUC instituted an international study abroad program—the International Student Exchange Program, or INSTEP. Since then nearly 600 students have participated in and benefited from this program of study in the United States and Taiwan. The first fifteen years of the program were run largely by the administrative staff from the academic affairs division, with minimal committee involvement. This is significant because INSTEP includes course credits and is therefore an academic program and would normally have been administered very tightly by a group of faculty members appointed to the International Programs Committee. The study abroad program, however, had always been firmly rooted in the liberal arts, not in either of the business faculties, and thus was located peripherally, not centrally, to the academic curriculum. From about 2000, however, there had been a conscious attempt to shift the program toward the center of the business curriculum. This was fraught with difficulty, largely because of resistance from both those in the administration and those academics who had a vested interest in keeping the program under their watch. First-Year Seminar and the Freshman Orientation All incoming freshman are placed into first-year seminar classes. Though there is some semblance of choice for the students, for all intents and purposes it is a rather random assignment into these “homerooms.” As a rule, there are twenty students per seminar. The professor is assigned a random cohort of twenty students and decides the basic theme depending on his/her research interests. These themes traditionally were open-ended (i.e., anything goes), but in 2001 it was decided to group the seminars into six different areas of study—“Morality/Logic/Philosophy,” “History,” “Contemporary Society,” “Healthy Body and Mind,” “Communication & Culture,” and “Science in Society.” The 36 professors involved in this program were asked to develop the class themes within these groupings, and students chose one of the six groupings and were assigned a class accordingly. In actuality, although the process was smoothed logistically, and students were given a better chance of being assigned an area of study closest to their interest, the change appeared to have little affect on the actual content of the seminars themselves. The result is that there is a wide variation in the first-year seminar curriculum with very little consistency, corresponding to the “academic freedom” (maybe carrying over into a “pedagogic freedom” of sorts) held so dear to professors in Japan. Each class very much depends on the style of the professor, as well as, to a lesser extent, the “chemistry” of the students in the class that year. Some professors focus on fundamental writing and research skills within the chosen topic. Others prefer to lecture to the small class (a more captive audience than the larger lecture 64
REFORM OF JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION classes). A few professors take advantage of an opportunity to involve students in their own ongoing research (something that also happens in the second- and third- year seminar courses). And there is the occasional professor who uses the small class as a healthy “excuse” to relax and chat with students in a collegiate, friendly fashion, hoping to close the distance between student and professor. This is not always deemed appropriate, however, and such professors are occasionally labeled as lazy because they are “shirking their responsibility to teach.” To say that someone is “lazy” (namakemono) in a work environment is one of the worst accusations that can be made about a co-worker in Japan. There is such a strong rhetoric of always being “busy” (isogashii), one that is ubiquitous in any work environment (indeed, any social environment) in Japan, that although a co-worker may be labeled incompetent, “lazy” is usually avoided. Even so, there is little or no action taken against such inappropriate teaching behavior, not least because there is no formal recourse and no precedent to engage in such teaching assessment in anything other than a passive form of data collection (student questionnaires, formal and informal student complaints, teacher room and after hours “talk,” though such data is not necessarily discounted). Seminar Classes The second and third-year seminar classes, or zemi, are, unlike the first-year seminars, perhaps the most interesting pedagogically. The professors are free to teach however they see fit, and the focus of the seminars is a general theme that is usually decided by the professor, as in the first-year seminar. There is great variation—some professors decide to lecture just as they would in a regular course, others mix lecturing with discussion and research projects, and still other seminars resemble an “Oxford seminar” or tutorial in that the students decide on specific topics to research within the overall theme and present these papers in groups, pairs, or individually to the rest of the class. At most universities in Japan, seminars are difficult to gain admittance to. They often represent an esteemed membership experience that adds a certain punch to one’s resume, not without value when job-hunting begins in the junior year. At EUC the percentage of participation in seminars is somewhat larger than other universities—about 80 percent of all EUC students elect to enroll in a seminar class. I am not sure of the reason for this. It could be because the EUC seminar environment is less competitive than at other universities, or it could be because of a higher teacher/student ratio than at other institutions, or perhaps because students have less involvement in the more traditional university clubs and so have less extracurricular commitments, leaving more time for involvement in seminars. These seminars take on a social function as well, and many students end up making good friends (or consolidating friendships, as often a pair or group of friends will enroll in a seminar together). There is sometimes a fraternity/sorority/club type of element, which becomes intrinsic to these seminar groups. The most popular seminars have an enrollment limit (often set by the 65
CHAPTER 2 professor). Upperclassmen, third- and fourth-year students, either together with the professor or independently, will admit prospective students to “their” seminar based on short essays and interviews. Some of these seminars have a very strong tradition of “senior-junior” (senpai-kōhai) continuity. There is a socialization into the world, by the planning of functions at fancy hotels, for example, similar to corporate functions that employees would be expected to organize. This seminar, Washiyama-zemi, although perhaps the strictest at EUC, seems to be one of the most popular choices among students, and students relate to me that it is rather competitive to enter. Being accepted into the seminar group, though linked to the “objective” interview and essay, may depend ultimately on who you know— a “senior” friend in the seminar may be all that is needed to guarantee your acceptance. On the other hand, the dislike of an upperclassman with power could prevent you from acceptance into the group. A strong element of collaborative learning seems to be an essential element in the seminar class. Groups of seminar students present their research “findings” at the annual seminar presentation event. Participation in this event is not mandatory, and some seminars elect not to be involved (a strong freedom of choice is given to students by some professors—others take a more coercive approach). Within the groups, as well, there is a certain security in numbers, which can work either as a motivator for good performance or as a shield to divert responsibility and be lazy, though peer pressure often results in the former. This collaborative model is one that is used in Japanese primary and secondary school as well, a mode of learning that most students are quite familiar with. The professor delegates responsibility to group leaders. This is also a modus operandi at many corporations, perhaps justifying the use of such a method at schools and universities to prepare students for the working world. Such a collaborative model of learning is not without advocates amongst western educational experts (Debski 1997; Nunan 1992; Van Lier 1996), especially for classes of mixed levels, like in Japan, where setting or tracking students into levels is not often done (cf., Whitburn 2003). Though collaboration is not always overtly encouraged throughout Japanese schooling, the idea of students helping one another during class is not considered unfair in Japan and is common practice from an early age. Interdependence has a positive connotation in Japanese society, and this is no exception in the classroom. Non- Japanese teachers in HE often have great difficulty understanding why when called upon in class students invariably consult with their neighbor instead of responding directly to the teacher. Of course while this is tolerated by Japanese teachers who consider it “normal” classroom behavior, it irks the foreign teachers to no end. PROCESS OF CHANGE The declining birthrate in post-baby-boom Japan is perceived by some professors as being the impetus behind these curriculum reforms, but this does not seem to be as direct a relationship as I had originally thought. As two professors told me, “Curriculum and teaching reform will not necessarily impact the number of 66
REFORM OF JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION applicants, since this is usually determined by the name of the school and its location. By giving more support to first-year students, these changes might help to retain students already enrolled.” In other words, the implicit understanding among some faculty is that this may be a strategy to gain control over the educational process in hopes that “better” schooling may diminish attrition, a topic that the president spent considerable time addressing at both the entrance ceremony and the overnight seminar. The dropout rate at EUC reached an alarming rate of over 10 percent over four years. Though North American HEIs often have considerable rates of attrition, at Japanese universities the norm is different. Usually every effort is made to “help” the student to graduate. This means that this rate of attrition must be estimated, as exact figures are difficult to derive because of the practice of ryūnen, studying beyond the normal four years. Though some students do eventually graduate after five or six years, often with much “assistance” from the university faculty and administration, many are enrolled on paper only, paying tuition but not showing up on campus. Through my observation and conversations with professors I realize that the foreign language and first-year seminar changes were implemented partly to gain more control over practice—an attempt to reform practice among instructors (and thus to more effectively train students). This control is multifaceted. For the foreign language courses, it involved the following considerations: 1) the L2 teaching-style of foreign instructors was considered by Japanese professors to be too much of a “culture shock” for first-year students; 2) normally the firing of professors is difficult, so the curriculum change gave a ready excuse for terminating the contracts of a few part-time professors, with curriculum changes being implemented with full-time professors using the excuse of MEXT; 3) a curriculum change was a less radical choice than the proposal that one full-time language professor was strongly advocating—outsourcing the entire ELT program to a private educational corporation; 4) previously, Japanese English professors were not directly involved in the compulsory classes of the core curriculum, and they felt concerned that their role in the university may become marginalized. Since there was (and is) considerable and open opposition to change in the first- year seminar curriculum, the process was accomplished in two steps. First, the selection process by which the freshmen chose their respective first-year seminar classes was changed. Then, a few years later there was a reform of the entire syllabus. There was the feeling among many business professors, explained to me directly in conversation and argued indirectly in the faculty senate, that more control is needed over the first-year seminar classes because: 1) there is a need to institute a better advisory system to help students adjust to college life and 2) it is important to help students with writing and self-presentation skills so they may have a head start in job hunting preparation. The administrative staff echoed these rationalizations for change. The head of the student affairs office in detailed explanation to me about the freshman orientation emphasized that the purpose of the program was: 1) for students to learn college study skills and 2) for an EUC Orientation. 67
CHAPTER 2 An interesting tangential development to curriculum reforms was an increased interest in faculty development (FD) workshops among the FLG professors. Two seminars were conducted, one in each semester, the first on computer-assisted language learning and the second on project-based language learning. Though arranged and organized by the full-time staff, both workshops were conducted by part-time professors who volunteered to share their expertise and their time. Regardless of effect on the actual quality of teaching practice, these events certainly added an air of professionalism, helped to bridge the divide recently between part and full-time professors, and raised the status of the FLG within the EUC community. CONCLUSION Responses to external reform pressures involve institutional, disciplinary, and curriculum changes. The pressures of a declining birthrate, national politics, and decreased funding have introduced a survival of the fittest mentality into the higher education sector, which has been followed by the introduction of neoliberal reform measures and deregulation. In the literature on HE reform in Japan, some authors take a positive position regarding the reform measures, while others are much more pessimistic about the quality and speed of change. Not surprisingly, these pressures are affecting EUC. Not only has there been the obvious drive to recruit more students, but also more interest in practices that are aimed at improving the rate of retaining students through graduation. Also, influence on disciplinary practices is revealed through an account of English- language teaching reforms in Japan in general and at EUC specifically, practices such as the consolidation of the curriculum and the tracking of students based on ability. Another change was the “construction” at EUC by the leadership of an institutional history that emphasizes the founder’s purported belief in a “family- like education” (kazoku kyōiku). The president has then coopted the professoriate into this ideology in order to bring about curricular reforms in literacy, a semester system, student guidance, and other changes to the daigaku. Even in the face of such bureaucratic hegemony—the license for reform given to the president, and the absence of absolute power or influence of individual professors—the autonomy of the professoriate affords certain members a tremendous veto power, which can effectively impede, though not always stop, implementation of change. 68 Document Outline
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