Curriculum Development and Practices

As a longstanding facet of national and local curricula, human rights learning in Japan places emphasis on social inclusiveness by recognising individual uniqueness and capabilities to enable new individual and communal identities. Yet such learning takes place within renewed political efforts to utilise education to impart Japanese cultural values and pride. Learning outcomes as a result of potential tensions between the particularism of ethnonational identity and the universalism of human rights remain an underexplored area of empirical research. Building on the work of Basil Bernstein and others, this presentation will discuss findings from an open-ended survey instrument, focus groups interviews and semi-structured interviews with 152 students and 8 teachers at two upper-secondary institutions. Institutions were sampled on a maximum-variation frame and included a private women’s institution adhering to human rights learning in the national curriculum, and a public co-educational institution implementing its own institution-specific human rights curriculum and pedagogy. Institutional learning under the national curriculum is found to deemphasize human rights learning broadly and externalize the image of human rights issues as pertaining to non-Japanese. While curricular content continues to play a significant role in learning outcomes, the research also points to the importance of pedagogy in fostering respect and empathy towards the individual self and non-like others in the community.

The purpose of this interactive paper is to provide a provocation for ideas and thinking around the question of how weaving passions, interests and needs can contribute to the joy of learning.  This provocation represents an initial point-of-entry text (POET) in complexivist bricolage and counts as a starting point for the research process (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004).  Creating webs of relationships between phenomena, cultivating differences, working across disciplinary boundaries are features of complexivist bricolage (Kincheloe, 2001).  In complexivist bricolage, the initial POET evolves over the course of the research as the researcher engages in non-linear and reflexive explorations to understand the research phenomena and question, and create new knowledge.
The exploration in this paper is both a philosophical and conceptual inquiry.  It seeks to explore and understand diverse perspectives on the phenomena of passions, interests, needs and joy of learning, as well as their possible inter-relationships.  It does this by engaging the participants in this session to share, dialogue and discuss relevant experiences, insights and research.   At the same time, the exploration is collaborative in the sense that participants can record their perspectives for everyone to take away.  Such an approach is consistent with the complexivist methodology that focuses on opening up new research possibilities and enabling participants to select, from these possibilities, their path(s) to continue their own individual or collective explorations (Davis & Sumara, 2006).