Bringing Forth a World (Engaged Pedagogy in the Japanese University)

Offering a critical yet constructive response to the perceived crises in tertiary foreign language education in the Japanese university, the contributors to Bringing Forth a World provide theoretical and practical solutions which together act as a prolegomena to bringing forth a world. Theirs is an ecology of contribution in liberal arts education which takes responsibility for the care for youth, and contests intellectual passivity and indifference in foreign language instruction.

The editors proffer a transformative, engaged and multidisciplinary liberal arts pedagogy, one at odds with forms of lowest common denominator, one-size-fits-all, and standardized provision. In response to the prevalent business-dominated model, they demonstrate an applied format of multiliteracy theory—one with semiotic, multimodal, feminist dimensions—which is regionally specific and better accounts for divergent forms of human expression and perception. The writers not only take account of the intellectual and mental issues in the student demographic but also in the teaching profession which suffers from widespread anxiety, job insecurity and a lack of autonomy, experimentation and innovation.

Philosophically, the contributors to this book demand a form of meaning-making which is fundamentally social and creative, and which celebrates processes of ‘becoming-other’ in-between the student and teacher that seldom, if ever, follow a predictable trajectory. It is hoped that readers will embrace the spirit of the book, pick up its philosophical gauntlet to think otherwise than prevalent standardized models of teaching and learning, and therefore will use its core tenets to experiment with different ways of educating the youth of today.