Search results

Humans remain unsuccessful in their attempts to achieve environmental sustainability, despite decades of scientific awareness and political efforts toward that end. This paper suggests a fresh conceptualization, one that focuses on education, offers a fuller explanation for our lack of success and calls attention to alternatives.

The authors first critically review mainstream approaches that have been used to achieve environmental sustainability, then introduce an alternative that the authors call the cultural approach. The authors finally discuss how educational research should be re-articulated based on the cultural approach.

The authors identified three mainstream approaches – the technological, cognitive approach and behaviorist – all of which function to reproduce modern mainstream culture. In contrast, the cultural approach assumes modern mainstream culture as the root cause of environmental unsustainability and aims to rearticulate it. To elaborate a cultural approach, the authors recommend education scholars to (1) bring attention to the role of culture in sustainability and (2) identify education practices that are potentially useful for enacting a cultural shift, primarily developing richer synergies between qualitative and quantitative research.

Unlike many previous studies in the field of education, the authors’ account highlights how current mainstream approaches used for current global education policymaking often merely reproduces modern mainstream culture and accelerates the environmental crisis. It thus proposes to redirect educational research for a cultural shift, one that allows human society to move beyond the comforting rhetoric of sustainability and face the survivability imperative.

In this short piece, written from the authors’ particular perspective as co-chairs of the Globalization & Education Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), they argue that the field of comparative and international education is fraught with contradictions. This chapter reflects on the implications for the field of three interrelated aspects in particular: the shift in the primary responsibility for education from the nation-state to non-state actors in our globalized world, the unsettled ontological assumptions of the field, and the lack of theory that informs some of its actors.

This paper reviews the national and institutional internationalization activities in Japan's higher education sector and considers the extent to which these efforts have attempted to incorporate and/or contribute to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This paper was developed based on a review of available demographic data on internationalization in Japan (in both English and Japanese), a survey of recent scholarly literature on this topic and conversations with numerous faculty and staff members working on internationalization issues in a wide range of higher education institutions throughout the country.

There are substantial internationalization efforts being made at both national and institutional levels, yet scholars and practitioners of higher education question the extent to which genuine internationalization is occurring. Moreover, the metrics used to track internationalization are somewhat limited and the available data, in many cases, can be complicated to interpret. A bit of tension also exists in Japanese universities between those who support the movement to internationalize and those who see it as a passing fad, an intrusion on their academic freedom and/or as a guise for Westernization – a tension that some cite, along with language barriers and system misalignment, as a challenge to internationalization.

Numerous scholars discuss the internationalization of higher education in Japan. The originality of this paper is in the comparison of Japan's higher education internationalization efforts to the movement to achieve the SDGs – both in Japan and as a global effort.