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ERIC Number: EJ1473613
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-May
Pages: 13
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-2191-611X
EISSN: EISSN-2191-6128
Available Date: 2025-05-13
Decolonising the Curriculum in Japanese Language Education in the UK and Europe
Kaoru Umezawa1; Tomoko Fujita2; Fumiko Narumi-Munro3; Chisato Ofune4; Akiko Tomatsuri5; Chieko Yonezawa6
Language Learning in Higher Education, v15 n1 p321-333 2025
In recent years, "Decolonising the Curriculum (DtC)" has been widely discussed and advocated in the European educational landscape as part of inclusive education. However, few examples of its practice in Japanese language teaching have been reported. While discussions of DtC in Japan often focus on the context of Japan's former colonies, this context does not apply to Japanese language education in Europe, where Japanese is positioned as a minority language, thus a target for inclusion. Considering these complex contexts, we conducted a survey of Japanese teachers to understand the position and goal of DtC for Japanese language education in Europe. This report primarily investigates how Japanese language teachers in Europe perceive and implement the concept of decolonisation in their teaching. The project highlighted the complexity of DtC within Japanese language education in the UK and Europe, where both the perspectives of the coloniser and the colonised are present. Our findings revealed a range of practices for reviewing power dynamics in the classroom to make education more inclusive, whether respondents intended DtC or not; there were different ways of understanding DtC. We hope that this initiative will provide an opportunity for further discussion of DtC in the teaching of languages other than English.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United States; Europe
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Durham University, Durham, UK; 2University of Warwick, Coventry, UK; 3University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; 4The Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Urawa, Saitama, UK; 5University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK; 6Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK