Iwanami Koza Kyoiku Henkaku eno Tenbo (Iwanami Academic Series of Education: Prospects for Change [7 volumes])

These series are the newest in the historic Iwanami series of education. The five editors are all current (Kodama, Kitamura) and former (Sato, Akita, Shimizu) faculty members of the Graduate School of Education, the University of Tokyo. In addition, many faculty members of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Tokyo have participated as authors in various parts of each volume.
 
Volume 1, in order to provide a general overview of the series, focuses on five important themes: publicness, educational inequality, children's learning and growing, educational reform, and the global age, and includes articles by five editors on each theme, as well as dialogues with intellectuals active in related fields.
 
Volume 2 explores the possibility of overcoming the problems of inequality in Japanese society. The premise is that the stable relationship between people and society has become a thing of the past, and that public education in Japan, which has functioned as a device for training the people and a pipeline for supplying human resources, is becoming more and more like an arena for competition for survival among people. In the midst of such a situation, this volume pursues how we can create a different kind of educational system, and how we can reform the current situation.
 
Volume 3 considers how to support the development and becoming of children at various stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, and what education can do, taking into account changes in the environment surrounding children, such as the rapid decline in birthrates and the increase in the number of poor families, as well as the impact of the media environment on relationships among children.
 
In Volume 4, we find the essence of the crisis of teachers in Japan in the fact that the advancement and professionalization of teacher education has lagged behind significantly. Then, looking at the increasingly severe current situation of teachers' work, we examine the measures necessary for their growth as "experts in learning" from various perspectives.
 
In Volume 5, in light of the development of the Internet and other changes in the media environment, the question of what and how to learn in school education is re-examined in this age of overflowing information. We will report on various practices in schools to see how learning, classes, and curricula are about to change, and look forward to new methods and meanings in education.
 
Volume 6 examines the image of schools in the midst of changes from the traditional welfare state type of educational administration and the politics inherent in them, from such angles as "decentralization," "accountability," "NPM (New Public Management)," "empowering school," and "school board reform”. It also presents a multifaceted view of the politics of conflict among actors, including gender issues in education.
 
Volume 7 examines how to foster "citizens" who will be responsible for the realization of an international and democratic society, with an eye on the shift from conventional education, which has focused on fostering "citizens" based on the nation-state, to education that is undergoing major changes due to the rapid progress of globalization. In particular, we will report on the current status of educational policies in countries around the world, and consider the future of education in Japan.
 
What is consistent in these series is that the present age is an age of ambivalence between crisis and possibility, and we seek to turn it into a possibility from within, and beyond that, we look to redefine education. Educational study, which is engaged in knowledge networking, can be a medium or bridge that coordinate the voices of different people. Such bridging Educational study suggests one direction of the redefinition of education that these series aim to achieve.

 

(Written by KODAMA Shigeo, Professor, Graduate School of Education / 2021)