Published papers

 This paper examines the actual circumstances of the recent teacher shortage in public elementary and middle schools in X Prefecture. Although the teacher shortage has been reported before, few prior studies have investigated it empirically. With the cooperation of all five branch offices of the Prefectural Board of Education, data was collected in three ways: 1) a questionnaire survey in June 2021 of the branch offices, 2) three interview surveys in July 2021 of the administrative officers at the town level, and 3) 2019-2021visiting surveys of the X Prefecture branch offices and the municipal Boards of Education of four towns. First, the questionnaire surveys clarified the actual numbers as of May 1, 2021 in three stages. 1) As the first stage, 1,971 positions for full-time teachers-with-tenure were unfilled. 2) Teachers-without-tenure were recruited in the second stage, but 150 positions remained empty. 3) Part-time teachers were recruited in the third stage, still leaving 115 positions empty. 4) In the end, each school was required to manage by themselves. This survey also made it clear that the teacher shortage increased in each term because more and more teachers left on maternity or sick leave, with no substitutes. This suggests that the first national teacher shortage survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in July 2021 should have been re-designed, because it focused only on the conditions of the first term. Second, the paper found that the teacher shortage had been increasing in this prefecture since 2018, caused by multiple factors on the micro/meso/macro levels at each stage. 1) Four factors were found in the first stage. (1) Although teacher numbers were strictly determined by national law, the government had not revised these figures for 41 years. The local government had additionally decreased the figures in order to prepare for a future teacher surplus based on declining birthrates. However, teacher demand rose due to the increase of children with special needs. (2) Administrators were cautious about hiring teachers-with-tenure. While the number of teachers could not exceed the set amount, hiring was risky because of the greater number of small and transient special education classes. (3) Fewer applicants were taking the employment exams. Teaching itself was not as attractive as before. (4) More teachers were taking maternity leaves, and for longer periods. 2) The shortage in the second stage was caused by the lack of teachers-without-tenure. Few teachers were on the candidate list because most of them were already hired with tenure. 3) The shortage in the third stage was caused by the teacher license renewal system which began in 2009. Many licenses had expired. Third, the effects of the shortage were examined. It caused overwork among teachers, because each school had to cover 3.91 teachers' absence as a team. The paper also found that 60% of current teachers had less than ten years' experience, which is likely to have negative effects both on the quality of teaching and the professionalization of teaching.

In this paper, Emma Willard's posture as a teacher is clarified as well as the actuality of her teacher education, with their meaning examined, by focussing on Troy Female Seminary founded by her in the early 19th century. Troy Female Seminary has been the object of inquiry in the context of female education. However, neither the accomplishment of Willard as a teacher educator nor her pedagogy at the Seminary has been reviewed in the U.S.or in Japan, so that thses areas remain to be studied. Therefore, this case study rewrites the conventional understanding of the U.S history of teacher education in five points as follows. First of all, in the historical studies of American teacher education, it was traditionally said to be established for the first time by state normal schools in the 1830's. In actuality, however, Willard had already created the organs of teacher education and the pedagogy in the 1810's. Indeed, it was the theory developed at the Seminary that provided the logical ground for the establishment of the state normal schools. Second, prior researches explained that the U.S.professionalization movement for teacher education was motivated by rapid increase in demand for teachers for the Common School Movement. However, the case study on Willard indicates that the logic of teacher professionalism and teacher training had already been presented before the increase in the demand. In America, the professionalism emerged, not from the social needs for teacher education, but from the efforts of females who were trying to attain economic independence and expansion of educational opportunities and who were in need of the professionalism of teachers for the purpose of creating a demand for their own services. Third, this case study elucidated that the teacher preparation in the U.S.began as women's higher education. It accounts for the phenomenon in which most students of the State Normal Schools were women. In addition, it enabled a conventionally neglected relationship to be clarified, a relationship between teacher education and women's education, particularly between the low social status of teachers and that of women.Willard made a great success in the tactics of claiming female suitability for teaching profession on the basis of femininity under the then prevailing gender precepts. However, her logic had the unintended consequence of low wages and low social status of teaching profession, prejudiced gender comparison, ranking difference from male managerial jobs, etc. Fourth, the history of teacher education conventionally described conflict between the group of academies thinking much of teacher's scholarly attainment and the group of the State Normal Schools emphasizing teacher's preparatory education. In the subject case study, however, a curriculum integrating the two groups had been created. The curriculum at the Troy Female Seminary was equivalent to that of a college for men though Willard avoided calling it a college for tactical reasons avoiding repulsion from the society. This discovery suggests that"the third trend"existed about 80 years before Dewey, which is worthy of note. Fifth and finally, this case study revealed that Willard and other leaders at Troy Female Seminary had developed as early as the 1820's, unique text books and teacher education methods in which a number of illustrations were used for the purpose of promoting visual understanding based on Pestalozzi's pedagogy. In the prior researches, it was explained such that Edward A. Sheldon at Oswego Normal School first applied Pestalozzi's pedagogy to teacher education in the United States.

In this paper, the author examines how teacher preparation programs have changed since 1990 in relation to the reform of higher education in Japan. In the previous literature, studies on teacher preparation programs have been conducted separately from those on higher education, despite the fact that K-12 teachers are trained at the post-secondary level in Japan. As a result, the impact of recent reforms of higher education on teacher preparation programs has been overlooked. First, the author identifies the impacts of recent higher education reforms on teacher preparation programs. The marketization of higher education led to a deterioration in relations between teacher preparation colleges and local boards of education. As a result, the contents of the programs came to be increasingly influenced by non-academic ideology and the administrative policies of each local government, rather than by scholarly research and critical inquiries. Second, the author examines the impacts of recent reforms targeting teacher preparation itself. Through an analysis of reports on reform of the Ministry of Education, the author finds that the policy of reform changed around 2000. The Law on Teachers' Licensure was revised toward a standardization of the teacher preparation curriculum, which had once been deregulated in the 1990s. Therefore, the author argues that both higher education reform and teacher preparation reform deprived many colleges and universities of their autonomy in the area of teacher education programs. As unintended results, the teacher education colleges have been transformed from "educational institutions" which support students with appropriate career guidance, into "institutions of teacher supply" which shape people into teachers in order to guarantee the survival of their own organizations. The author also cites the necessity of interdisciplinary research to create a bridge between higher education and teacher preparation. For example, this article stresses the need to reconsider the definition of the two key phrases that have been used as the main principles in preceding researches on teacher education since World War II: "Teacher preparation in college" and "openness of teacher preparation." On the basis of recent research on higher education, as shown in this paper, there does not appear to be a consensus today on the two phrases. For example, the fact that the commonsense definition of "what is college?" has already been lost compels us to re-examine what kind of content is required for maintaining the quality of teacher preparation programs at the college level.