One of the most important recommendations in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted at the UN Summit in 2015 was "No one will be left behind". Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer pointed out that the dominant form of music education in training musicians is Romantic or Dionysian. Schafer finds this type of music education…

Inspired by the call to question (critical) assumptions underpinning frameworks for "seeing" (Lather, 1993) and ground criticality in alternative forms of knowing (Pennycook, 2018), this paper examines critical frameworks for approaching identity, experience, and (in)equity in "English" language teaching (ELT), with a focus on…

Equitable access to high-quality higher education is in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 4, 5, and 10, which indicate that it is crucial for a future sustainable society. Globalisation and reductions in systemic barriers to university admission are creating increasingly diverse higher education classrooms, but traditional…

How has schooling functioned in the construction of meritocratic national systems historically? To what extent will these historical patterns and normative commitments continue in the new era of a global meritocracy? And ultimately, how can educators effectively balance the inherent tension between individual merit and standardized quality? Kariya…

Increasing linguistic and cultural diversity has led to an increased need for plurilingual pedagogy in the language classroom. This study expands the scope of the existing literature on plurilingual pedagogy in a different context: a Japanese language classroom at an English-medium instruction (EMI) university in Japan. It focuses on students'…

The study evaluated a recently postponed national test policy on the use of external agencies' English tests measuring four skills for Japanese university admission purposes. Using Kunnan's principles of fairness and justice, we generated and evaluated three claims regarding the test policy: vocabulary coverage of the tests, the justifiability of…

The educational research literature has promoted integrating students with disabilities into mainstream classrooms since the 1970s. In 2007, the Japanese government amended the School Educational Law, which has increased the number of educational opportunities available to students with disabilities. At the same time, the Japanese education system…

This book critiques dominant discourses and debates pertaining to cultural identity, set against the current backdrop of growing social stratification and unequal access to quality education. It addresses current discourses concerning globalisation, ideologies and the state, as well as approaches to constructing national, ethnic and religious…

The social basis of a teaching profession is created through behavioural and cultural patterns, specific artefacts, and their connection to certain institutional practices. The purpose of this study is to discover the conditions that structure the teaching profession in a cultural context and to find out what it is to be a foreign language (FL)…

This paper examines private tutoring systems in three East Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, and Cambodia) with the purpose of examining the relationship between those systems and formal education systems. The study of private tutoring systems in each nation can be used to reveal the inadequacies of the formal education system in meeting the…

Educational research in cooperative learning suggests that inequity based on perceived status may be an issue with heterogeneous cooperative learning groups. This paper explores issues of status based on race, ethnicity and cultural background in the New Zealand tertiary classroom where there is a diverse mix of domestic and international…

This article explores the design and implementation of critical action research undertaken to encourage equal classroom participation. Building on a body of literature on critical action research and oral participation, the author reports her research project undertaken in a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic class in Japan to examine practices of how…

In this book, leading scholars in the field examine the available research on the use of evidence in education and provide suggestions for strengthening the research-to-practice pipeline. Critics within and outside the field of education often point out the absence of a strong reciprocal connection between research and practice. The emergence of…

These proceedings contain the papers of the International Conference e-Learning 2016, which was organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society, 1-3 July, 2016. This conference is part of the Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2016, 1-4 July. The e-Learning (EL) 2016 conference aims…

This document reviews the Japanese educational system and examines middle school education in particular to identify cultural differences and help improve educational quality in the United States. Contents include: (1) "An Overview of Japanese Education"; (2) "Teacher Behavior in the Classroom"; (3) "Teacher Behavior…