Schoolteachers’ Professionalism and Teacher Training in Japan

Drawing on the perspective of critical pedagogy, this chapter discusses the influence of neoliberal ideology on teacher training reforms in Japan as well as the resistance from Japanese teachers to such reform directions. Key incidences and policy debates on teacher training are examined to illuminate how neoliberalism, together with neoconservativism, has shaped an image of teachers as "teaching specialists," based on which teacher training system has been reformed. We argue that an important question concerning how the teaching profession should be understood has been taken up as a political/ideological confrontation between the Liberal Democratic Party and the Japan Teachers Union and, thus, left unanswered in any practical sense. This lack of shared understanding has left teachers and their training vulnerable to neoliberalism and neoconservativism that overwhelm the present Japanese education reform discourses. Responses from teachers to such reform directions are also discussed focusing on the manabi no kyodotai (school as learning community) movement, in which teachers try to regain their own professionalism as "learning professionals."