Lesson Study is a Japanese approach to teacher development borrowed by American researchers in the late 1990s seeking to break from top-down, "best practice" approaches. Two decades later, Lesson Study has gained a strong foothold in American policy circles. Seeking to contribute to the growing research base, this article looks deeper…

Seeking to contribute to recent attempts to rethink the deepest foundations of the field, this paper offers news ways of contemplating time, specifically its relations to self, nihilism, and schooling. We briefly review how some leading Western thinkers have contemplated time before detailing Japanese scholars who have offered divergent, original,…

This article revisits the newly "discovered" island that world culture theorists have repeatedly utilised to explain their theoretical stance, conceptual preferences and methodological approach. Yet, it seeks to (re)connect world culture with the real world by replacing their imagined atoll with a real one--the island-nation of Japan. In…

World culture theory seeks to explain an apparent convergence of education through a neoinstitutionalist lens, seeing global rationalization in education as driven by the logic of science and the myth of progress. While critics have challenged these assumptions by focusing on local manifestations of world-level tendencies, such critique is…

This book attempts to theorize cross-national attraction by comparing American and Chinese attraction to Japanese education. The study takes a long historical view--spanning roughly from the Meiji Restoration (1868) to today--to determine when and why Japanese education has become attractive to these two countries. It uses a combination of…