Sachiko Horiguchi

Towards ‘thick description’ of educational transfer: understanding a Japanese institution's ‘import’ of European language policy

Globalisation and convergence in educational policy worldwide has reinvigorated, while rendering more complex, the classic theme of educational transfer. Framed by this wider pursuit of new understandings of a changing transfer/context puzzle, this paper explores how an ethnographic ‘thick description’ might complement and extend recent research. Specifically, it relates findings from extended ethnographic work on an attempt by a prominent Japanese university to ‘import’ the Council of Europes Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). This rare case of explicit ‘borrowing’ from a supranational space directly to the domestic institutional level, when approached in such a way, suggests new insights to help the field refine understandings of the processes, ‘shape-shifting’, and ‘success’ of international policy migration.

Fostering learning through unlearning institutional boundaries: a ‘team ethnography’ of a liminal intercultural space at a Japanese university

This paper is an ethnographic study of weekly intercultural meetings held at an alternative community space run by a large private university in Tokyo, Japan. Through a ‘team ethnography’, the two authors of this paper illuminate ways in which alternative modes of learning were promoted and institutional boundaries were transgressed and unlearned. We argue that this was made possible by its spatial as well as organisational liminality. We begin with an explanation of Turners notion of ‘liminality’, which provides our conceptual framework. This is followed by a reflexive account of our methodological approach, which leads us to the ethnographic description of our field site and our engagement in the field. We then analytically situate our ethnography in the larger institutional and social context. Our analysis focuses on the transgression and ‘unlearning’ of professional hierarchies, age-related, ethnic and linguistic boundaries that permeate the mainstream Aoba institution as well as how alternative, experiential learning is promoted at this liminal site.

Are Children Who Do Not Go to School “Bad,” “Sick,” or “Happy”?: Shifting Interpretations of Long-Term School Nonattendance in Postwar Japan

This chapter examines postwar debates in Japan around long-term school absence at the level of discourse and practice. The chapter begins by unpacking postwar official statistics and policy discourses on long-term school absence in relation to competing medical and citizens’ discourses, with a particular focus on changes in terms used to refer to school nonattendance. I show how moves toward the medicalization of absenteeism as an individual “sickness” in the 1980s were met with criticism from citizens promoting alternative school movements, leading to encouragement for noninterventionist approaches at policy level. I then outline the “emergence” of hikikomori (social withdrawal) as a youth social problem in the 2000s, which prompted a revision of these approaches, shifting the blame back to the individual children and their families. This chapter reveals how policy and popular discourse have resonated with each other and how various stakeholders of education have led competing discourses and practices on long-term school nonattendance, both positive and negative, shedding light on a larger question of whom education is for. The chapter concludes by introducing the latest debates and issues around school absenteeism and by highlighting the diversification of alternative schooling opportunities.

Bringing a European Language Policy into a Japanese Educational Institution

This chapter describes the identity politics involved in the process of implementing institutional language education reform through an ethnographic case study of one Japanese educational institution, which we shall call Aoba.1 Like many leading educational institutions, Aoba is seeking ways to “globalize” through curricular and pedagogical reforms.