Education

Students are expected to be able to distinguish different focuses and approaches to environmental education for sustainability, and then plan their own learning strategies according to the educational context they must address.

This course examines Japanese schooling from sociological and comparative perspectives. The first section focuses on the socializing role of schooling. What kind of values and skills are learned in Japanese schooling? How do they differ from other societies? How do they change from preschool to high school? The second section focuses on the sorting mechanism of schooling. To what extent is Japanese education system an egalitarian system, in terms of social class or gender, when compared with other OECD countries? How do countries differ in their conceptualization or educational equality or mechanism of stratification? The last section addresses some recent educational reforms that have been widely debated in Japan.

Decolonizing education is critical for social justice in the Global North and South. This raises important questions about the relationships between knowledge, power, and society in the past and present. This course addresses these issues. It engages with the politics and history of education in both UK and international contexts. It critiques how the curriculum has privileged particular knowledges and identities in ways that are racialized, gendered, and classed. Throughout the course, students relate these issues to students’ own experiences of education and what decolonizing education means for them.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course content covers the following topics:

a) a review of theoretical models for interpreting daily life and daily social interactions as educational arenas

b) video-ethnographic methodological approaches centered on social interaction to identify and study educational processes in daily life

c) observation and analysis of video recordings of communicative and educational events in both ordinary (e.g., parent-child interactions in the family) and institutional contexts (e.g., pupil-teacher or parent-teacher interactions at school, doctor-patient or caregiver-doctor interactions in healthcare contexts)

d) the illustration of training perspectives that can be implemented to promote self-reflexivity and support the subjects involved in communicative and educational experiences

At the end of the course, the student knows: the main theoretical assumptions concerning the study of everyday life and mundane educational events; the main theories and theoretical-methodological approaches for investigating mundane interactions as occasions for learning, education, and socialization; the micro-pedagogical approach to education, i.e., the study of the ways in which the members of a community give meaning to their everyday lifeworld, construct, and transmit culture in and through their social practices and interactions. The student is be able to: analyze mundane practices and interactions by relying on a (video-)ethnographic approach and Conversation Analysis; identify the educational value of social interactions in a variety of ordinary contexts (e.g., parent-child interactions in the family, pupil-teacher or parent-teacher interactions at school, doctor-patient or doctor-parent/caregiver interactions in healthcare settings); reflect on mundane educational experiences and the role of language and interaction in education, socialization, and learning processes; use this knowledge and skills to act as a “reflective practitioner”, in order to implement interventions aimed at promoting self-reflexivity and awareness of the subjects involved in mundane educational experiences.

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