This book is about education, ideology, power and identity investment and concerns an influential East Asian expatriate community. Specifically, it seeks to understand particular ways in which the Japanese white-collar elite live as a closed and self-referentially defined in-group, despite the manifestly multicultural ethos of their Singaporean domicile. The study attends to issues regarding schooling, unity, diversity and community based on grounded anthropological observations. Specific observations centre around the particularities of Japanese nation-state schooling practices set in cosmopolitan Singapore, a contrastingly non-Japanese setting. The insights therein are made possible by way of seeing education as an ideological domain and powerful discursive platform. Using this framework, cultural and identity-related practices are viewed dynamically and appreciated for their fluidic reflection of identity praxes. Readers will gain fresh insights into the role of education and ideology in reproducing asymmetry and the value of sociohistorical analyses in surfacing hidden power relations. Researchers, educators and decision makers will appreciate the transparency of grounded ethnographic observation yielding insights into practices which imbricate inclusion-exclusion and privilege-marginalization debates within a neoliberal hegemony. Students of the social politics of education and the cultural politics of language, ideology and identity will find the book a provocative read.

The purpose of this book is to show how research on families can be used to offer inspiration, suggestions, and guidance to intercultural families choosing to school their children in the regular Japanese school system. Each chapter is written by a parent or parents who are themselves researchers and thus bring their skills to the task of writing about issues which have affected their families, and are likely to affect other families in similar ways. There are also suggestions for other non-Japanese parents coping with similar issues. The book is divided into three sections: The first, “Finding our own way”, deals with children’s and parents’ struggles with identity and inclusion in Japanese schools and society. The second, “Dealing with the Japanese school system”, offers narratives and advice on such topics as coping with homework and dealing with more than one school system, as well as what government-accredited Japanese overseas schools have to offer. The third section, “Coping with challenges”, examines the experiences of families where children are “different” because they have physical or intellectual challenges, or live with foster or adoptive families. The book concludes with a narrative about a family who made the decision to remove their children from the Japanese system entirely and send them abroad for schooling. The authors of the chapters in this book are all current or former university faculty, living in different areas of Japan. Some, who live in highly-populated urban areas, have had ample opportunities to locate educational options for their children, while others, living in rural communities, have had to struggle to advocate for their children’s inclusion in mainstream classes. Their stories are all compelling and their advice is certain to be helpful to those planning to or already raising children in Japan. This book will also be of value to researchers and educators, particularly those with an interest in bilingualism, intercultural families, and cross-cultural issues, along with anyone wishing to learn more about contemporary Japanese society.

This book explores critical pedagogy and issues relating to entrepreneurialism, commodification, and marketization in education, and their deleterious effects on student agency and subjectivity. The central theme of the book is a cross-border critical ethnographic study of the shadow education practices of an overseas Japanese business community in Singapore which ​d​​ra​w​s attention to the elaborate extent to which families are engaged in shadow or cram tutoring practices as part of their children’s education, supported by the strong presence of overseas branches of well-established corporate tutoring businesses headquartered in Japan. The author ultimately critiques a banking approach to education, particularly in terms of its oppressive and dehumanizing outcomes, sustained by the inner workings of neoliberal forces and mercantilist ideologies.

This book analyses how children from transnational Japanese-Singaporean families are educated. The author demonstrates that the negotiated educational pathways of these children have significant bearing on the ways in which individual identities of mixedness may be constructed or contested – where notions of mixedness are necessarily recognised for their inherent fluidity, contextuality and contingency. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to students and scholars across the fields of education, neoliberalism, globalization, multiculturalism, mobility and cross-border migration.

The book brings together contributions from curriculum history, cultural studies, visual cultures, and science and technology studies to explore the international mobilizations of the sciences related to education during the post-World War Two years. Crossing the boundaries of education and science studies, it uniquely examines how the desires of science to actualize a better society were converted to the search for remaking social life that paradoxically embodied cultural differences and social divisions. The book examines how cybernetics and systems theories traveled and were assembled to turn schools into social experiments and laboratories for change. Explored are the new comparative technologies of quantification and the visualization of educational data used in the methods of mass observation. The sciences not only about the present but also the potentialities of societies and people in the psychologies of childhood; concerns for individual development, growth, and creativity; teacher education; and the quantification and assessments of educational systems. The book also explores how the categories and classifications of the sciences formed at intersections with the humanities, the arts, and political practices. This informative volume will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of curriculum studies, the history of the social sciences, the history of education, and cultural studies, and to educators and school leaders concerned with education policy.

In Search of Identity was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Educated Japanese have been faced with a basic ideological problem emerging out of their country's modernization program. They have had to declare themselves on the great issues involved in their nation's planning: West versus Orient, democracy opposed to autocracy, individualism versus collectivism. To the individual this ideological debate became a search for identity, and it is this problem, the search for identity, that forms the background of this book.The authors report upon a cross-disciplinary study of the Amerikaryugakusei - "those who study in America" - in the historical context of the modernization of Japanese society and Japan's cultural relations with the United States; they describe and portray the experiences of the individual Japanese student on the American campus and back in Japan; and they analyze the adjustment of the Japanese student to different cultural environments.One group studied included Japanese students who were enrolled at two American universities. Another group consisted of Japanese who had returned to their homeland after their American education. The study is concerned, not with education per se, but with social and psychological aspects of the educational experiences.This is the fourth in a series of monographs resulting from a program of research sponsored by the Committee on Cross-Cultural Education of the Social Science Research Council.

This volume charts the rise of the concept of "inclusive development" and simultaneously recognizes its problematic implications as it shifts the focus of development work from efficiency to justice. In response to increasing awareness that development projects can all too often lead to the exclusion of marginalized populations, Considering Inclusive Development across Global Educational Contexts sets out to foreground trends and experiences that can inform socially just approaches to development. Structured in three parts, the volume explores several educational themes - aid and development, the human-environment nexus, and economic redistribution. Chapters look in detail at how approaches in these areas can help or hinder inclusive educational development globally, and highlight representative, critical, and relational models of inclusive development that can more strongly inform education by/from broader development trends. This timely volume will be of interest to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of education development, inclusivity, and sustainable development. This book would also benefit graduate students and scholars in development education.