Mie Narimatsu Associate Professor

Research overview

Research to promote equality and teacher education reforms in public education in Japan Learning forms of school education suited to Japan from the United States
My research mainly covers efforts to bring equality to education mainly in the United States. In Wisconsin, school choice programs were introduced from 1970 onwards to promote equality in education. I studied in Wisconsin for two years, and while I was there, I visited some local schools and boards of education to survey their school choice programs.

■School choice programs
When I began my research in around 2000, with the exception of private schools, for which students took an entrance exam, it was usually the case that students went to a predetermined public school, and people in Japan did not yet know about school choice. I promoted the idea of school choice programs in Japan because I wanted to help improve public education here. A decade later, some areas of Japan began to adopt school choice programs. The advantage of school choice programs is that you can choose the school you want to go to. For example, you can choose a school that specializes in English education or music education, or a school that offers unique forms of education.

■Teacher education reforms
Since 2012, I have been researching teacher education reforms in the United States as a whole. The aim of this research is to identify the structure of the teacher education system in the U.S., and how American universities and boards of education cooperate to unify what teachers learn during the process of their training, hiring, and internship as a means of improving their professional qualities and abilities. The education system in Japan is such that teachers often work overtime—some say they work too hard. This means that when we envision how a stable teaching profession could look in the future, we absolutely must consider the three vectors of teacher training, hiring, and internship as a cohesive whole.

■Subject-based teacher assignment system in elementary schools
Since last year, I have been researching the subject-based teacher assignment system in elementary schools. While there are still issues that need to be thoroughly discussed and examined concerning this system, such as the way in which classes without a homeroom teacher would be managed or the kind of structure that a training system for subject teachers would take, the subject-based teacher assignment system is effective from the perspective of improving and promoting equality in public education. I hope that my research will yield many findings, and that it will provide food for thought for when conducting teacher education reforms.

School education is not only about learning, but is also important in the sense of forming the foundations for social skills. If the situation in the world improves, I would like to travel and conduct a thorough survey of legislative systems and other systems.