The Aim of the Project

With the coming of this new age of globalization, Eastern Asian countries find themselves in need to advance the abilities of its educational professional and educational administration staff. The goal of this project is to develop an international education leader joint degree program in collaboration with leading universities of East Asia as well as ASEAN countries which would become a model of leader training for the whole Eastern Asia.
The nature of globalization goes beyond capital or national borders and its phenomena differ from country to country. In the context of the globalization in the present day, Eastern Asia has brought issues such as multiculturalism and economic and cultural inequality which challenge the current education system. To answer this challenge, we have to bring up educational professionals who have international perspectives and would be able to improve the excessively knowledge-centered current education system of Eastern Asia.
In the recent years the countries of Eastern Asia have sought to reform their excessively knowledge-centered education by introducing the education of skills and attitude to achieve overall development of the students. Unfortunately, at least in Japan, it is hard to say that educational system has shown any changes. Even worse, this country is actually cutting down the number of international students it welcomes annually.
The only way to cope with globalization is to experience the global environment actually and to train education professionals (educational administration officials, school teachers) with thorough knowledge of both local and global matters. For this we have launched researches on developing international education leader joint degree program by cooperating with leading universities of East Asia.
Grounded on strengthening of international networks and collaborative operating environment this project consists of two branches: 1) basic research on joint degree program development and 2) action research on joint degree program development.
The goal of basic research on joint degree program development is to understand of joint degree program’s actual situation through investigating precedent local and foreign examples. The main targets of this research are: higher education system, goal and contents of the education, organization of staff and facilities, student recruitment and admission, scholarships and other livelihood support, and finally assessment of the whole program. Most joint degree programs evolve through trials and errors, thus we will consider a great number of circumstances from previous cases of both success and failure.
Action research on joint degree program development is the actual developing of the program centered in the Graduate School of Education Tohoku University. We have carried out a variety of academic exchanges between leading Eastern Asian universities. Currently we still actively promote international academic exchanges. By taking advantage of this network and cooperating with partner universities, we anticipate the training of specialists we should encourage, their curriculum, development of needed teaching materials and assessment of their learning outcomes. At the current state our research focuses on the establishment of a master degree course.
In addition, using our research accomplishments so far, we also put the joint degree program in practice.
Our expectations of this program are as follows: forming a research center for international education leader joint degree and bringing up qualified education leaders able to cope with the world’s standards through supplying them with international standard quality guaranteed education.
In the future, we can share our experiences among the countries of the whole Asia, and we expect to build a network of collaboration for solving various challenges confronting education system through the increase of cultural exchange.