Peter Jarvis calls it "Practioner-research." Lots of other people call it "action research." Whatever you call it, it amounts to a very practical tool for bringing illumination to the dark corners of complacency. Up to now I have only heard or read about action research in the context of English second or foreign language education. Jarvis talks about using it in more general sense, as a way of examining any field of endeavor.

"Genuine understanding of any field can only be developed through practice in that field." Extraordinarily empowering quote from the dust cover of the book.

In putting together a workshop on reflective development for the Yokkaichi Teachers' Initiative, a teacher development program Andy Mellor and I do at Yokkaichi U., I have run across some more great titles from Jossey-Bass on reflective teaching and action research. They do a great job of putting together collections of books on adult learning, teacher development, critical thinking, and education theory in general.

Today I've been looking at two books, Stephen D. Brookfield's, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, and Peter Jarvis's, The Practitioner-Researcher: Developing Theory from Practice. I'll end up using more quotes from Brookfield, because Jarvis centers more on action research. I won't spend too much time on that, because we only have one day to focus on the reflective development issue. There is so much fun to be had with all the ideas represented here.

Don't know who's responsible for the various myths that go around, but in my years 17 odd years in Japan, there's one that I've heard often. "Japanese students can read and write English, but they can't speak and listen." That is a myth that has not rung true after associating my students. The reason I mention it is because I evaluated my students today on material that they have learned this semester. There is a spoke section as well as listening, reading, writing and culture sections. They do pretty well when it comes to speaking and listening, but have a very difficult time reading or writing. (All of my unit exams are on my web site if you care to look.) When I say, "...a difficult time," I mean that they can read a word on the paper, possibly sound it out, but then have difficulty relating it back to the katakanized word they know. For example, in an exercise we were doing in class today was the word "gardening." A fictional character had the hobby. One student asked what it was, started to sound it out himself, and it didn't register with anything he knew. I said it for him, and he made the association between the word I said and the katakana version he knew.

My students rely heavily on what is written on paper, and have a hard time doing without it, but when they no longer have a paper to rely on, do very well at producing and understand language. When they have to go back to the paper then, and associate the words they have been saying with what is written on the page, there is a gap. There's a lag between seeing the word on the paper, sounding it out, and relating it with what they have been listening to and saying in their speaking practice. They have seen the words before, but the way they pronounced them before and after the speaking practice are different. It is great fun to watch them make the connections.

The Japan Civil Liberties Union
( http://www.jclu.org), a group of lawyers and legal experts, released yesterday a
proposal for a law eliminating racial discrimination in Japan.

Did you have any idea that racial discrimination was not illegal (at least)?

You want to know how many elementary schools used English for all or part of their "comprehensive studies" courses in 2002? Give a look at this article from the Japan Times:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20030501b7.htm
"NPO looks for English boost via teacher-accreditation plan"
The answer is 56%. The NPO plans to list teachers and institutions that train teachers for teaching English at the elementary level.

It is an interesting scheme, and private. The MOE doesn't plan on starting their own accredication system, but says that public schools can use this one.

This is what it's called in Japanese:
�uNPO���w�Z�p��w���ҔF�苦��v�i�ʏ�J-SHINE�j
www.j-shine.org

I'll read up on it and explain more later.

This is a continuation of my 5/16 reflection on the review by Jeff Kingston on Japanese Higher Education as Myth:

I know I should be reviewing the book itself, but being the country it is and where I am, I'll have to wait for my copy do be delivered. Maybe that should be an entry in itself.

The next quote from Kingston's review is one on testing.

According to McVeigh, the greatest tragedy of the education system is the
emphasis on examinations and the consequences of this focus on students. He
is not so concerned about the content of the exams, rather it is the process
of preparing for and sitting exams that is so devastating. Learning is
trivialized, "Because it is used merely for testing, knowledge is sliced,
disconnected, disjointed, stored, packaged for rapid retrieval, and is
abstracted from immediate experience. Consequently, knowledge loses its
meaning as a body of information that points to something beyond itself, and
acquires an overly practical, banal, and dull character. _Daigaku_
[universities] rest upon pyramids of shattered knowledge, with the more
substandard schools sitting atop small pieces of knowledge ground into fine
bits by the crushing stress of examinations."

I on the other hand am interested in the content of the tests, because I believe it is a crucial piece of the puzzle that answers, not the question of [what] or [why], which I believe McVeigh will probably answer, but [how] the tests work to shatter knowledge. The content of the national, "Center Exams," are created by a mysterious, specially selected group of professors, who then sequester themselves and create an exam. The exam is published without being checked for reliability or validity. My own experience with the English portion of a "Center Test" is an example. After proctoring a Center Exam, I received a text booklet. On the English test were several questions that required students to select the syllable of written sentences that were stressed in normal speech. Those this may be possible in some cases, since the sentences were presented in the context of a dialog, others were impossible to predict. My guess was that there was a code, a kind of pattern that students were taught to follow when they answered these kinds of questions, so I asked a few of my better students about how they would answer. They gave several different answers, and reasons for them, and then asked what the "right answer" was. I told them that I did not know, as I could not predict it for myself. As it happened, I attended a presentation the summer after these exams where a highly regarded university professor was explaining English entrance exam questions to high school English teachers. He happened to use one of the very questions that I found to be troublesome as an example. I went through my misgivings about the problem in detail, and he agreed that the question was unanswerable in it's given form.

Now, does one strange question make it important? Only to the student who needed one score to enter a university and missed that mark by one point. Were there those students? There had to be. Was that as a result of that question? Who knows? My point is that the content of the exams is such that students cannot be fully prepared for exams, because the material to be tested is arbitrary and in at least one case, faulty. Tests are taken by the students, they are evaluated by others, scored by others, and students are left to feel that they are "smart" if they are lucky, somewhere in the middle, or "stupid."

The message is clear. Knowledge is in the posession of others. The average student cannot posses it. The only recourse for them is to submit to the system, roll the dice, and accept the outcomes.