Japanese children’s perspectives on the
Table 1.1: Violence and property damage in primary school in 2012
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- Table 1.2: Violence and property damage in lower secondary school in 2012
- Figure 1.1: Incidence of school bullying in Tokyo
- Figure 1.2: Percentage of school non-attendance in the last 10 years
- 1.2 Moral education and citizenship in Japan
- 1.3 The discovery of Peer Support
- 1.4 History of Peer support
Table 1.1: Violence and property damage in primary school in 2012 The total number of schools is 1,304
(The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, 2014) Table 1.2: Violence and property damage in lower secondary school in 2012 The total number of schools is 631
(The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, 2014) From the tables, it is noticeable that almost half (47.2%) of the lower secondary schools reported violence towards teachers and damage to property inside the school. Also in primary schools, about 10% of schools reported violence and property damage. Figure 1.1: Incidence of school bullying in Tokyo  (The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, 2014)
Table 1.3: School bullying in 2013 (Tokyo)
(The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, 2014) Regarding the school bullying, the majority of schools, 73% of primary schools and 84% of the lower secondary schools reported that they had bullying issues in their schools. In 2013, a substantial number of schools conducted their own surveys, or one to one interviews (between children and teachers), as a means by which to provide appropriate educational support. This highlighted the gravity of the problem of bullying issues, which was much greater than previous year. Also, the surveys suggest (The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, 2014), that a substantial number of pupils in both primary and lower secondary schools have become engaged in non-attendance at school (school refusal). In 2013, 6469 pupils across 602 lower secondary schools refused to go to school. This is equivalent to one pupil in each classroom not attending school. Figure 1.2: Percentage of school non-attendance in the last 10 years  (The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, 2014)
Table 1.4: School non-attendance in 2013
(The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, 2014) These surveys have been interpreted by The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education, (2014), who showed that a substantial number of pupils in both primary and lower secondary schools have become engaged in non-attendance at school. One interpretation is that this is a form of school refusal because of fear of violence, bullying and other personal issues. Clearly further more rigorous evidence is required to confirm these interpretations. In 2013, 6469 pupils across 602 lower secondary schools refused to go to school. This is equivalent to one pupil in each classroom not attending school. One reason for this, according to the survey, is that children are worried about being bullied by their peers. Work by researchers (Kawauchi & Uehara, 2013; Maruyama & Takeda 2010; Zhou & Dohno, 2006; Katsuzaki & Kawashima, 2005; Oda, 1998) described how most non-attendance at school has been related to or caused by peer relation issues. In a sense, peer relation issues seemed to be related to students struggling to maintain good relationships with others. According to Sato (2007), children wanted to make efforts to positively cultivate their friendships with others, however, they struggled to achieve this due to their poor abilities and experiences. In this vein, Matsuo and Kasai (2015) emphasised the importance of social skills, the ability of children to understand others, express themselves and create mutual agreements. Also, in Ichikawa’s (2014) review of non-attendance at school, several factors were identified as those resulting in non-attendances at school, including relationship with teachers, sense of alienation, pressures by after-school jukus (or cram schools), poor academic performance and illness. Ichikawa reported that the most common cause of non-attendance at school was relationship issues with friends (e.g. bullying, exclusion from the friend’s group), which cause children to have emotional, social and behavioural difficulties. Ichikawa concluded that it is necessary to set up support systems to provide children with appropriate mental and physical support. According to Ichikawa, these systems should be multi-layered and involve supportive groups, including school teachers, counsellors, parents and friends. A more radical solution would be to implement a total change in the hierarchical ways in which Japanese schools are organised. The Early Childhood Education Central Council for Education in Japan (2007), examined the reasons behind the current educational issues. Their discussion paper concluded that in general children’s poor social skills seemed to strongly relate to their relationship issues. However, as indicated earlier in this thesis, there is no evidence of a direct causal link so it may be that this conclusion is unwarranted. Furthermore, the conclusions seem to place the blame on the children rather than on the educational system.
There has recently been intense national debate in Japan over the function of education with regards to the preparation of children to be good citizens and to be responsible members of their community (Ishikura, 2014; Yano 2014; Kudo, 2014). In fact, in October 2014, Central Council for Education in the Japanese government, announced that the national curriculums of moral and citizenship education will be reformed to have sustainable and future-oriented strategies for children’s future (Mori, 2015; Takahashi, 2015). In particular, the curriculum strategies are aimed at children’s problem solving abilities and assertion skills, particularly in relation to school bullying and internationalisation, which will be enforced in schools in 2018 (Kudo, 2015). Citizenship education comes from three areas, moral education, social studies and special education. As a part of the national curriculum, moral education or ‘Dou-toku’ (literally “the path of virtue”) has been taught in schools for more than 100 years (McCullough, 2008). Nowadays, all primary and lower secondary schools are required to organise 35 moral education lessons per year (each lesson is 45 minutes in primary school, 50 minutes in lower secondary school). Moral education is similar in content to the Personal Social Health and Economic Education (PSHE) curriculum in the UK. Moral education has four aspects of study;
(Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; MEXT, 1989) Citizenship is also taught in the social studies part of the curriculum. The topics include geography, history and civics. Children experience visits to off-school sites, listen to invited speakers and learn about community organisations and Japanese lifestyles. Additionally, they study Japanese political systems. Japanese children are also given opportunities to practice good citizenship in such events as sports festivals, graduation ceremonies, field trips and activities for the local community. All students are expected to be actively involved in planning, organizing, implementing these activities through team work, communication of ideas, maintenance of school traditions and handing on from older to younger students. In addition, Japanese children are expected to carry out everyday activities to train them in socially accepted behaviours, these activities include cleaning the classroom, toilet, washroom, and gyms; caring for living things such as small animals and fish, taking responsibility for feeding them even during vacations; students also take part in the life of the school by joining sports, musical, cultural and academic clubs, which are mainly run by the students themselves. These clubs provide opportunities for developing cooperation, responsibility, diligence, self-improvement and friendship. This provides practical experience of the moral issues discussed in moral education classes. In spite of its long history, there are some difficulties with the moral and social education curriculum. There are many problems in its implementation, for example, not enough time to take children out of the classroom to do activities that develop their moral sensitivities and the empathy for others, and insufficient numbers of invited speakers (Hasegawa, 2015). The content is often taught in a very didactic manner. According to the Japanese National Survey of Enhancement of Moral Education (2003), 81.5% moral education lessons are carried out by reading stories and episodes from a textbook in primary schools. In other words, the moral education curriculum tends to be taught in a didactic way with very little experiential or ‘hands on’ learning (Matsuoka, 2015). The experiential activities have increasingly given way to academic studies. In this sense, Matsuoka (2015) summarised that through reading stories and learning in a didactic way, there is very little probability that children actually put things into action (altruistic behaviours). Another difficulty is that some teachers have tended not to set a high value on the moral and social education curriculums (Kudo, 2014) as it is not perceived as being part of the core academic curriculum. In some cases, teachers have used curricular time for moral education and replaced it with academic studies due to time restraints (Shiomi, 2007). This has been reported over the last two decades. For example, Ueta and Araki’s (1992), found that only 37 (out of 150) primary teachers completed the required 35 moral education lessons per year. The most frequently cited reason for this was to use the time allocated for moral education for other academic lessons and school events. Furthermore, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, reported a similar result that teachers tend to use the time allocated for moral education for other academic lessons. In 2012, a research group (Sato et al., 2012) from Tokyo Gakugei University conducted a nationwide survey about teachers’ attitudes toward “Moral education” (Dou-toku). The participants were 332 teachers from lower secondary schools, which were encouraged to give a high priority to moral education by the Japanese Government; as well as 1262 teachers from randomly selected normal lower secondly schools. The teachers were asked to answer a number of questions using the Likert scale (5 options); 1) strongly agree (SA), 2) agree(A), 3) Neither agree or disagree (NAD), 4) disagree (D) and 5) strongly disagree(SD). For example, when the participants were asked “Do you believe the lessons of moral education play a critical role to enhance children’s emotional and behavioural well-being?” The majority of teachers showed positive views (SA&A) on moral education (75.9% in randomly selected normal schools and 85.8% in encouraged schools). However, when the participants were asked whether the lessons of moral education play a critical role as prevention methods over bullying and other children’s anti-social behaviours or not”, about half of teachers responded positively (52.4% in encouraged schools, 48.5% in randomly selected normal schools). Interestingly, when the participants were asked to regularly provide lessons of moral education, more than 70% of teachers (73.2% in encouraged schools, 74.8% in randomly selected normal schools) answered that they did not feel they had the time available for this. As a consequence, nearly half (49.8% random schools, 47.3% encouraged schools) of teachers took time from the moral education lessons, to use it for teaching academic studies. 1.3 The discovery of Peer Support As a part of this concern for the social moral and emotional development in children, the Japanese government proposed that counsellors should be appointed in all schools in 1994. The following year 1995, school counsellors were allocated to 154 primary and lower secondary schools. More recently in 2014, school counsellors have been working in 23,635 primary and lower secondary schools (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; MEXT, 2014). Counsellors are allocated at each school, and especially look after children who experienced social and emotional difficulties. They provided one to one counselling sessions, and helped children to do their homework and explored such issues as bullying and social exclusions. They also work with children who refuse to go to school. Most of their work focuses on the individual child and for that reason, the intervention is valuable, but can only reach a limited number of children. When the Japanese government proposed the school counsellor project in 1994, the Japanese Association of School Counselling and Guidance (JASCG) established an accreditation system for school counsellors in order to develop the core leaders for school counselling. Generally, the duties of the school counsellor include; 1) emotional support to children, 2) educational support to teachers and parents, 3) attending the meeting in school, 4) giving training or a talk in assemblies, 5) coping with children’s issues, 6) organising various prevention methods (e.g. stress assessment), and 7) emotional care after negative affairs. As a part of a training course of the Japanese Association of School Counselling and Guidance (JASCG), some counsellors and scholars visited an upper school in New York, where they saw examples of peer support in action (Nakano & Morikawa, 2009). This was the first time for Japanese scholars to see peer support activities as educational settings (Nakano & Morikawa, 2009). Then, in 1996, the first book on peer support programs was published in Japan. This was a translation of Cowie and Sharp (1996). The book mentioned some of the activities and approaches such as Acland Burghley School’s activities in London, as well as Canadian approaches by Cole. Cole’s book, “Kids helping kids” (1987) was also referred to as training material for peer support. Eventually a translation of “Kids helping kids: A peer and peer mediation training manual for elementary and middle school teachers and counsellors”, was published in 1999 in Japanese. At the same time, Acland Burghley School’s TV documentary (produced by BBC) on peer support, was broadcast by a Japanese Broadcasting station (NHK) in 1994. The concept of peer support attracted the attention of two lower secondary schools in Yokohama, the Hongo lower secondary school and the Nishikidai lower secondary school. They developed systems of peer support based on the Western models. Peer support was attractive to Japanese educators as it was in harmony with the aims of the moral and social educational curriculum, but at same time it gave practical opportunities for children themselves to address real social problems in their school communities. In 1998, Trevor Cole who had been coordinating peer support activities in Canada, visited Japan. Cole, had discussion with Japanese teachers and scholars, and ran a series of workshops and training sessions on peer support. These workshops were documented by Morikawa (2003), and Nakano and Morikawa (2009). Since then, members of the Japanese Association of School Counselling and Guidance (JASCG) have been actively learning from other countries’ approaches, and regularly hold workshops and training sessions for school teachers in various regions. Eventually some schools organized social and communication skills training sessions for children and tried to run various peer-led activities in schools. In 2001, the National Federation of Educational Policy Research Institutes set up a subcommittee on peer support. The National Federation of Educational Policy Research Institutes consisted of 204 educational centres and institutes of all the prefectures and some large cities in Japan. This led to the widespread use of peer support practices all over Japan in various forms, depending on schools’ needs. In 2002, the Japanese Peer Support Association (JPSA) was established with most core members from JASCG (Kurihara, 2007). Since then the Japanese Peer Support Association has been conducting annual overseas study tours (i.e. UK in 2003, 2010 and 2011, USA in 2005, Canada in 2004, 2006 and 2012, and Hong Kong in 2008 and 2009) and also holds regular general meetings and workshops on the subject of peer support. These activities strongly support the practitioners of peer support and work as a driving force for the improvement of its activities, training programs, relating researches and publications in Japan. Peer support has developed in a number of different ways in Japan, and at least five different methods have been described in the literature (Nishiyama & Yamamoto, 2002). Some have adopted the Western style of peer support, while others developed methods unique to Japan (Kurihara, 2007; Taki, 2002). When the responsibility was handed over to children, they developed new initiatives. For example, in Neyagawa city (Osaka), peer supporters themselves wrote a series of plays on such topics as cyberbullying (Takeuchi, 2010). Through the medium of drama, they wanted to convey the message “how awful school bullying is”, and “we should stop bullying others”. The student dramas have been performed in many schools and public places. Not only the lower secondary school pupils, but also primary school children and their parents were invited to see the dramas. The nature and types of peer support are discussed in section 1.5 and 1.6. 1.4 History of Peer support The supporting activities led by peers were often called ‘Peer support’, ‘Peer counselling’ and ‘Peer helping’, and these activities have been used in various fields such as mental health, medical treatments, welfare, social care, education, and care for minority groups (Cole, 2005). According to Nishiyama and Yamamoto (2002), one of the pioneer works in peer-led supporting activities in modern times started in 1904, which is called ‘Big brothers Big sisters program’ in New York City. This was volunteering activities that peers supported and looked after anti-social youngsters and/or juvenile delinquent. Then in 1909, the corporate organisation for Big brothers Big sisters program was set up and extended the activities across the whole nation. Based on the prevalence of the Big brothers Big sisters program, peer-led supporting activity was applied in educational settings in 1965 and it was called ‘Big brother-Big sister program in high school’ (Vaso, 1971). In the late 1970’s, the idea of peer support based on schools had become widespread and their activities had been conducted in the US and Canada. In those days, these peer-led activities were generally called ‘peer counselling programs’ and had been applied as study skill tutors, information counsellors, counsellors and social support and outreach workers (Guttman, 1989). Peer counselling was considered as a part of school counselling, and peer counsellors had been given training by professional school counsellors. Also the professional school counsellors played roles as supervisors to organise the peer counselling programs. However, in terms of peer counsellors’ roles, it had raised concerns that it should clearly discern professional counselling and peers supporting activities. In order to avoid the confusion with professional counsellors, it started referring as ‘peer helpers’, ‘peer facilitators’ or ‘peer assistants’ instead of ‘peer counsellors’ (Deffenbaugh & Hutchinson, 1993). Then, in the 1990’s, it have been generally called ‘peer helpers’ in the US and ‘peer support’ in Canada. In the UK, since school bullying had expanded considerably as an educational issue in the late 1980’s, ‘peer counselling programs’ had been applied as one of the intervention methods against bullying. As mentioned, peer counselling programs of Acland Burghley School in the mid 90’s, had a strong impact among UK educators, even though they raised many concerns among educators who doubted that such young people could be adequately trained as counsellors. However, there were no research studies at the time documenting these concerns. Furthermore, some adults were reluctant to share power with young people (Cowie and Sharp, 1996). However, research studies showed the effectiveness of peer support and gave teachers and researchers useful feedback (Durlak, 1979; Naylor & Cowie, 1999; Turner, 1999; and Cowie et al., 2002). The UK, also started using the term ‘peer support systems’ rather than ‘peer counselling’ and there was a huge increase in the development of peer support in schools thanks to the influence of ChildLine and its project entitled ChildLine in Partnership with Schools (CHIPS) through which trained counsellors went into schools and trained the staff to implement peer support. (See also Tables 1.5 and 1.6). Yüklə 3,09 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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