Toward Professionalisation or De-Professionalisation? Teacher Education over the Past 40 Years: A Japanese Retrospection

Overview & Synopsis

In this paper, I will discuss how to enhance Japanese teacher education. After sketching teacher education from the mid-1940s to the 1960s, I sum up the main topics people discussed through each decade of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Illustrating some of the current topics of teacher education in the first decade of the new century, I discuss what they would create by way of introducing a new type of Graduate School into the teacher education institutions, which raises the question whether Graduate Schools heighten teachers' professionalism or not. In conclusion, I propose an ideal network for promoting teaching expertise.