黑料传送门

This book was written as a textbook on the Periods for Integrated Study for students in teacher-training program. Among the many related texts available, it stands out for two distinctive features.
 
The first is that Part I, Theory, was primarily authored by current graduate students and early-career researchers. Specializing in education, they engaged in sustained discussions and collaboratively refined the text. Great care was taken in selecting expressions and terminology so that the chapters remain accessible to readers without prior specialized knowledge, while still conveying the intellectual excitement of learning. Each chapter concludes with a short column invites readers to reconsider the topic from another perspective, encouraging broader reflection. In addition, for important themes that could not be fully addressed due to space limitations—such as gender and sexuality or multicultural coexistence—each chapter includes sections titled “Let’s Discuss” and “For Those Who Want to Learn More,” offering starting points for further inquiry. Through these devices, the book seeks not merely to impart information but to prompt readers to become active agents who formulate their own questions and think independently.
 
The second feature is that Part II, Practice, introduces concrete practices carried out in schools in Fukushima Prefecture, one of the regions affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. As members of the University of Tokyo Hamadori Project, the authors have visited schools in Fukushima schools and provided continuous support for inquiry-based learning. Chapter 9, “Children and Adults Meet in the Community: The Case of Nakamura Daini Junior High School”, and Chapter 12, “Accompanying and Supporting Inquiry-Based Learning in Collaboration with a University: The Case of Soma Sogo High School”, present activities in which students themselves were directly engaged. Chapters 7, 8, and 10 highlight teachers’ own reflections on their practices and their significance. By learning how schools have devised diverse approaches and created new forms of learning despite challenges such as the earthquake and the COVID-19 pandemic, these chapters demonstrate that engagement with the “community” and the very forms of inquiry are never uniform. Although grounded in the specific context of Fukushima, the questions that arise resonate with broader, universal issues of education across Japan and beyond.
 
While designed as a textbook for teacher-training program, this book also provides valuable insights for schoolteachers engaged in practice, for parents seeking to understand the background and reality of their children’s inquiry-based learning, and for general readers interested in the latest developments in this field. The phrase “from students” in the Japanese title captures not only the authors' commitment to writing in an accessible manner from the perspective of students in teacher-training programs, but also their collective aspiration to move beyond the conventional assumptions and taken-for-granted norms that have bound them as students, and to venture into new possibilities of learning and teaching.
 

(Written by OTSUKA Rui, Professor, Graduate School of Education / 2025)