Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. 251 pp. (Tables.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-30941-5.
Christopher Bjork has written an important book that reflects his long experience with fieldwork and Japanese education, as well as reporting on his most recent research. It is at once steeped in expertise and innovative. While I have read the book through the lens of someone who has long shared Bjork’s focus on Japanese education, the insights he draws from his research, as well as the broader implications he points to, make this a book that scholars who focus on the transformation of education systems more broadly will find very interesting. Bjork’s study also provides telling conclusions about the (in)ability of seemingly unitary and powerful states to effect change across a vast and varied number of organizations.
One of the bases for the contribution that Bjork makes here is his methodological choice to conduct research across stages of education, across school types. Scholarship on Japanese education has long noted, but not explained, the differences between the free-flowing, inquiry-based pedagogy of elementary schools, and the rigid, somewhat numbing teaching style that becomes the norm in middle schools and through high school (and university). Bjork deliberately selected both, elementary as well as middle schools to be able to examine these in the context of their location and social setting. This makes his research somewhat unique in the academic literature and thus a good candidate for assignment in courses where a discussion of school types might be compressed.
The introductory chapters discuss the ebb and flow of Japanese educational policy, particularly the arrival of yutori education in the early 2000s, and the reaction against these reforms in the 2010s, and thus provide essential context. The core of the book is the empirical chapters, and it is here that Bjork shines. Chapter 3 thus describes the synonymous Nishiyama City where he conducted his research in six schools. Chapters 4–8 examine different aspects of the implementation of education reforms in schools, from the involvement of teachers in reforms (chapter 4), a focus on teachers in elementary schools (chapter 5) and middle schools (chapter 6), to the impact that policy implementation has had on students’ learning (chapter 7) and a discussion of a transformation of the relationship between students and teachers (chapter 8). The final three chapters zoom out from Japan and discuss comparisons across Asia (chapter 9), US teachers’ reactions to Japanese reform efforts and teaching (chapter 10), and a summary of and reflections on the findings (chapter 11) of Bjork’s research.
One of the puzzles that arises from Bjork’s descriptions of schools is that his interviews with teachers suggest that yutori education changed relatively little in elementary schools. In many ways, they were teaching in the “more relaxed” fashion encouraged by yutori education reforms already before these reforms. So, the introduction of the general study period (intended for project-based, more holistic instruction with greater connections to students’ surroundings and experience), in some ways forces a more rigid structure on teachers than what they had been accustomed to. This structure did not come with much support or resources for teachers to adapt to it, so it has been a source of tension among teachers.
By contrast, yutori education was designed to change teaching practices quite a bit in middle schools, but Bjork observed only limited implementation. The lack of training for implementation is one factor, but another important factor is teachers’ professional ethos and obligations. Ultimately, teachers face students in the classroom and feel some accountability to students and their parents. These in situ challenges point to tensions between the overall desire by policy-makers to move away from some of the rigidity of education, and the lack of movement in other aspects of the education system (like the high-stakes tests that still determine students’ futures in significant ways) that teachers find themselves faced with. There is also a pronounced sense that some of the changes are undermining teachers’ professional autonomy at a time when broader social changes are also reducing the authority inherent in the sensei position.
The broader insight we gain from Bjork’s research is that even in a seemingly top-down, unitary education system like that of Japan, where the national bureaucracy seems to hold a lot of power, all implementation of educational policy is local. The extent to which teachers buy into reform efforts thus not only determines the implementation of a policy, but also the significant variability in implementation from school to school or even classroom to classroom.
However, a book about “high stakes schooling,” as the title suggests, this is not. While Bjork conducted his research in the context of Japanese educational reforms that have long embodied an emphasis on testing, but have also shifted along with global policy-making that marches to the drum of the accountability beat, the schools he researches seem primarily to be resisting national policy-making and caught between much more local fronts of parents, neighbourhoods, and professional concerns.
But despite my misgivings about the title of this book, it is a terrific update on teaching practice and its relationship to national policy in contemporary Japan presented by a skilled researcher and thoughtful scholar.
Julian Dierkes
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 149-151