"Initiative for Attractive Graduate School Education" | Hideki Tokuda (Dean, Graduate School of Media and Governance)
2005.11.04
As Professor Kojima reported, SFC's new executive team began its term on October 1. Professor Tomita and Professor Sato have joined, and Professor Kumasaka has completed his term. Professor Kojima, Professor Yoshino, and I will continue in our roles for another two years.
The Graduate School of Media and Governance has already been promoting reforms such as increasing graduate school enrollment capacity, reorganizing programs, establishing doctoral courses for working professionals, and setting up a double degree program. However, to create a globally attractive research and education environment, I believe it is crucial to further strengthen the collaboration between undergraduate and graduate schools. It is also important to maximize SFC's research and education potential and establish an open research and education environment through initiatives like the 21st Century COE Program, the Support Program for Distinctive University Education (Good Practice), the Support Program for Contemporary Educational Needs (Contemporary Good Practice), the High-Tech Research Center Program, the Digital Media and Content Integrated Research Organization (DMC), and incubation facilities.
In fact, graduate schools are in an era of great competition. Starting with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's (MEXT) 21st Century COE Program, which called for proposals to create world-class research centers centered on graduate schools and to foster young researchers, the reform of graduate school education is now continuing with the recent call for proposals for the "Initiative for Attractive Graduate School Education." Incidentally, the aim of the "Initiative for Attractive Graduate School Education" is stated as: "to solicit proposals for programs that provide focused support for ambitious and original educational initiatives in graduate schools, with the goal of strengthening the function of fostering creative young researchers who can respond to the new needs of modern society." While the COE program targeted students in the Ph.D. program, this new initiative includes both master's and Ph.D. programs, which is fortunate for us as it allows for a more integrated graduate school approach. Although systems like the COE program's RA (Research Assistant) system have become established at SFC, they were only for students in the Ph.D. program. It was a problem that we could not hire master's students as RAs, even if they were aiming to advance to the Ph.D. program and had outstanding research achievements.
Regarding this call for proposals, two projects from Keio University's graduate schools were selected: "Cross-Disciplinary Project-Based Education on the Mind" from the Graduate School of Letters, and from the Graduate School of Media and Governance, "Fostering Researchers to Lead Governance in the Information Society," one of two selected projects (PDF). The Graduate School of Media and Governance aims to foster researchers who can lead the global information society. It will do this by offering courses such as international fieldwork, international internships, and international collaborative research projects, which are based on practical education that blends distance and face-to-face learning with overseas graduate schools. Additionally, it will establish an international double degree program that allows students to earn two master's degrees—one from a partner graduate school and one from our own—by studying abroad at the partner institution for one semester during their master's program.
The many other selected graduate school initiatives are also making various efforts and are very informative. However, to advance the qualitative improvement of education and research at SFC, I believe it is important to carry on the project-based practical education that has been conducted in our graduate school so far, and to establish an "autonomous, decentralized, and cooperative" graduate school where each student and faculty member can demonstrate their abilities and where the emergence of knowledge is made possible through collaboration.
p.s.
Reading this over, I see it's full of rather formal language, but for the next two years, I hope to approach things in a natural way, without being too rigid.
(Date Published: 2005/11/04)