The Creation of MMCE 

1. Build a cooperative learning community so we can learn from each other and teach each other. (I, II, VI)
2. Begin to understand the practice of multicultural education (V) (I realize now that I should have changed the word "practice"to "necessity".)
3. Learn from our classmates about the cultures and countries they are studying (I, IV)
4. Understand the daily life, traditions, history, and culture of our countries of concentration. (III, V )
5. Develop the skills necessary skills to interact with people from other cultures (For example - the skills necessary to elicit information about a certain cultures without offending anyone) (III), (IV)
   • the ability to share your learned information with other people. (VI)
   • the ability to investigate generalizations about other cultures and form your own opinions about them. (III)
   • the ability to lead discussions and cooperative learning activities. (VI)
6. Learn about different ways to look at cultures. (II)

Did we accomplish our objectives? To find out please go to the Schedule and Results page.

The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) consists of one year of intensive coursework after which students receive a Masters Degree in Education. Students have hundreds of classes to choose from and can take a minimum of 4 classes a semester. Because a Master’s student’s time is short and the number of classes they can choose is limited, they are told that they should take classes which they think will be most beneficial to them in the future. This means that they should choose classes that will most help them get the job they most want after graduating. My first few weeks at HGSE, I was feeling immense pressure to choose the right classes. After the second week, I was enrolled in 8 classes and could not manage the workload. I was falling behind in all 8 classes but I felt that they were all important and I did not want to drop anyone of them. I felt like I was going to go crazy. At this point, a friend told me about a class, Philosophy of Curriculum Design, taught by a man named Don Oliver who had a unique outlook on the way education should be.

Don was a man of about 70 years with a white beard, red cheeks, and a protruding stomach. He was mostly bald but the hair that he did have was white. The instant I met him I was immediately drawn to him and the class. When I first attended his class, he said that anyone who was worried about getting a good job after HGSE should not take his course because it would not help them. However, after experiencing the camaraderie of the class members, noticing their close relationship with Don, observing that contributions from class members were welcome and expected, and listening to Don’s compelling theories that completely contradicted the educational foundations of HGSE, I knew it would be a mistake for me not to take the course. Don quickly became a grandfather-figure to me; he was good-natured, caring but very opinionated and not afraid to say what he thought no matter what the consequences might be. .

Don's class compared to my others
In my other classes, the respective curriculums were clearly defined and strictly followed. The syllabi were challenging and fast-paced. The professor never deviated from the syllabus and we were expected to keep up with the pace. In a typical class, the professor lectured to a large number of students occasionally asking for questions or opinions. The professor was the transmitter of knowledge and we were its receptacles. Through papers, presentations, debates, and exams the professors and their teaching assistants would gauge how much we had acquired this knowledge. Although I will say that I had tremendous respect for all my professors and learned a lot from their classes, I felt overwhelmed. In Don’s philosophy of curriculum design, something that could be classified as post-modernist educational thought, the traditional student teacher relationship was rejected. To Don, in the traditional relationship, students were seen as raw material and the school was the factory. The jobs of the teachers, who worked at the factory, were to turn this raw material into some kind of wonderful new product. Conversely, in Don’s thinking, education is an experience that the students and teachers share. The job of the teacher is to provide the initial energy and imagination to stimulate the students’ learning. In Don’s own words “The teacher in not transferring a piece of knowledge or a skill to the student; the teacher is seeking to share a common world with the student as the student enters the world of the teacher and vice versa” (Oliver, 1989:162). Through the event of the teacher and student participating together in a unique learning activity and sharing a common world, both the teacher and students undergo a personal transformation in which their thinking and knowledge evolve. Knowledge is not matter that is acquired. Rather, knowledge is something that is inside of us and is continually evolving through our shared experiences. In most of my classes, aside from my Japanese class, I knew only a few of my classmates. In Don’s class, I knew all 40 of my classmates and learned that they are all very interesting people. Maybe some them also thought I was an interesting person. It was only really in Don’s class that I was not a piece of raw material but an important member of a group exploring educational theory and relating it to our lives. This was the only class where I felt uninhibited to participate as it was closer to a meeting of friends than it was a class.

A Final Reflection
Unfortunately, the factory metaphor of schools is strong and in the majority of classes the teacher will probably continue to be a transmitter of knowledge and the student a receptacle. Nevertheless, as a teacher I hope that my students can have a similar experience to the one I had in Don’s class. This was my major motivation for designing MMCE this year. I wish that Don was still here so I could ask him for some feedback. A little over a year ago, in the winter of 2004, I was telling a couple of students about my class with Don and did a search on the internet to see if I could find any news about him. I was shocked to learn that he had died a year before of a brain tumor. One of my regrets is that I will not be able to tell Don how influential he has been to me and also that he was wrong about one thing; his class has been immensely beneficial to me professionally. Although I only had him for a semester, I miss him and wish that he was still teaching and writing books.

II Dr. Kai Ming Cheng

I took Dr. Kai Ming Cheng's Cultural Perspectives in Educational Studies class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The course introduces different ways of looking at cultures and investigates their implications for the way that education is conducted in different countries. The theories of culture I learned in Dr. Ming's class have turned out to be very helpful to me here in Japan. One of the many theories studied in the class was Dr. Geert Hofstede's theories on national cultures and the five dimensions of national values: Power-Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity, and Long-Term Orientation. Although other researchers have pointed out some problems with Hofstede's methods of data collection and hypotheses, I have found his theory to be particularly useful to me when I consider why sometimes my classes in Japan succeed or fail miserably. For example, I have found that lessons which feature open-ended tasks in which students are free to solve a problem any which way they want or must answer a question without a predetermined answer are not as successful as lessons with more focused tasks in which there is a set method for solving a problem and the answer is predetermined. Does this have something to do with Japan having a higher uncertainty than the US? Can a high uncertainty avoidance score explain the need for many Japanese students to consult with eachother before telling a teacher the answer even if they know the answer? Well, I cannot supply the answer for sure, but knowing that ambiguous situations can fail magnificently and that students in Japan will think more carefully before giving an answer and thus I should be patient in waiting has helped me improve my teaching in Japan. The danger with Hofstede's theory that has been pointed out by a few members of MMCE is that generalizations about members of a country can cause us to apply these generalizations to all of its people which is wrong. Furthermore, I also have to be careful about the last statement I made about Japanese learners' high uncertainty avoidance. A universal law of instruction is that any student will hesitate to positively respond to a learning task that is too ill-defined or covers a topic that is too ambiguous or foolish. For example, a Spanish teacher in the USA once tried to have a discussion with her class about which emotion was better love or hate. (Lee, 2000; p. 21).

Like Don's class, Dr. Kai Ming's class was a little different from a typical class at HGSE. Every member of this class was called a "co -learner" and I borrowed this term for MMCE.

III Intercultural Communicative Competence

What are the kinds of knowledge and skills one needs to interact effectively with members of a different culture. Dr. Michael Byram (1997). Byram (p.34) writes that successful intercultural communication depends on the following factors:

	Skills Interpret and relate
Knowledge Of self and other; Of interaction; Individual and societal	Education Political education Critical cultural awareness	Attitudes Relativising self and valuing other
	Skills Discover and/or interact

Skills refer to the learner coming across a document (advertisement, newspaper article etc.) and being able to discover the allusions or cultural connotations in the document. It also refers to the ability to discover new things about a culture independently and to make be able to make these discoveries while interacting with a member of a different culture in real time.

Knowledge refers to the knowledge of social groups and their cultures in one’s own country and social groups and their cultures in the other person’s country. It also refers to the knowledge of how to respond to a member of the different culture in specific incidents of interaction. Attitudes refers to the needs to suspend disbelief and judgment with respect to other meanings, beliefs and behaviors. This means that when you encounter cultural differences, you recognize that your culture itself might seem peculiar to other people and refrain from making hasty judgments about the other culture. This (Byram: 1997, pp. 43-44) can be brought about by political education which leads learners to reflect ion their own norms, including those of other societies and their own, in order to promote the ability of political judgment. Crtical cultural awareness is another goal of Education; this is the awareness of how dominant groups in the target culture have influenced members’ beliefs, practices and identity and how your own beliefs, practices, and identity has been influenced by the dominant group in your culture.

According to Byram (p.33), the Skills of interpreting and relating, Knowledge, Education, and Attitudes are preconditions for the learner to develop the Skills of discovery through interaction.

In MMCE we spent time on both sets of Skills as well as knowledge and attitudes but aside from the group that studied China we did not have much experience with political education.

IV Education is the developing of skills to make sense of chaos (William E Doll)

Chaos and Learning

I was introduced to the writing of William E Doll in Don's class but forgot about it until I picked up his book once again at the beginning of this year. Doll's belief that classroom curriculums should be open systems rather than linear passages with a starting point and a finishing point left a profound impression on me. These are some of the main points he made in his book:

1. Chaos: "Creativity occurs by the interaction between chaos and order, between unfettered imagination and disciplined skill. (Doll: 1993, p.88)" I interpreted that we should not be afraid to introduce ambiguous, difficult learning topics into the classroom whose resolution is open to interpretation but we need to help learners develop the disciplined skill necessary to navigate such rough waters.
2. Personal Transformation: The knower and unknown are not separate entities. Curriculum is about the personal transformation of the individual. In this transformation, new knowledge does not replace the learner's old knowledge. Rather the learner's old knowledge accomodates the new knowledge. The thinking behind this is that learners participate in a class with a wealth of experience, beliefs, and knowledge. It is not the job of the class to replace this knowledge with new knowledge but rather to help the learner understand the connection between her life experiences and knowledge and the content of the class.
3. Reflection is an important part of education: "Much of the process of education consists of being able to distance oneself in some way from what one knows by being able to reflect on one's own knowledge." As I said above the purpose of education is not to "discover" new knowledge but to transform old knowledge. One possible way of doing so is through reflection.

This year in MMCE I presented some fairly broad, abstract theories to the learners. Learners reactions to these contents blazed our path of learning rather than a predetermined syllabus. The end result of this was that I beleive our understanding (mine included) of the new concepts deepened but there were other extremely important concepts we were unable to touch upon.

V Multiculutural Education

According to Teidt and Teidt (2002), multicultural education is neither an actual practice nor an identifiable course or educational program. The key ingredient of multicultural education is respect for individual differences and diversity (ibid, p.14). Multicultural education is at least three things (Banks & Banks: 2003, pp.3 - 4):

1. An idea or concept.
This idea is that all students regardless of race, gender, social class should have an equal opportunity to learn in school. Another important idea is that some students, because of their characteristics have better chances to learn than other students with different characteristics.

2. An educational reform movement.
Multicultural education is also a reform movement that is trying to change schools and other educational institutions so that students from all social classes as well as racial, language and cultural groups have an equal opportunity to learn.

3. A process.
Multicultural education is a continuing process. It is not something that we “do” for a while to fix a problem. Since educational equity for all students is an ideal that might never be fully attained, we should continually work to increase educational equity for all students.

The reason why I chose the theme of multicultural education for ibunkarikai is precisely because it is a school reform movement. Furthermore, it is a process that does not end; many members of MMCE will become teachers some day, where they will inevitably have members of different cultures take their class. As the link shows the number of foreigners in Japan has been steadily increasing over the years. Furthermore, one out of every 30 children born in Japan has one parent that is not Japanese. Thus, the need for human understanding; the need not to give into stereotypes about members of different groups, the need to respect members of different cultures, understand how they might struggle to be accepted by Japanese society and change schools so that these students will be accepted and receive the same opportunities as mainstream members of Japanese society is necessary; this is the reason why multicultural education was chosen as the theme for MMCE.

VI People affiliated with the Iwate International Plaza

I have attended several education and international workshops at the Iwate International Plaza and after experiencing workshops as a participant I made a decision to try one from the side of the facilitator. Through the advice of practioners and my experience as a workshop participant, I have receieved invaluable ideas on how to include all learners in classroom discussions. The following ideas come from a book (チェンバース: 2002, p.243) recommended to me by an workshop facilitator I met at the Iwate International Plaza. I think it summarizes the idea behind workshops very well.

In an experiment, it was found that humans remember 20% of what they hear. remember 40 % of what they see and hear. remember 80 % of what they discover. Learning is 1 % taste 2 % touch 3 % smell 11% heard 83% seen Humans remember 10% of what they read remember 20% of what they hear remember 30% of what they see remember 50% of what they see and hear remember 80% of what they say. remember 90% of what they say and do.

実験によると、人間は 聞いたことの20％は憶えている 聞いて見たことの40％は憶えている 自分で発見したことの80％を憶えている 学習の 1%は味覚から 2%は触覚から 3%は臭覚から 11%は聴覚から 83%は視覚から 人間は 読んだことの10％は憶えている 聞いたことの20%は憶えている 見たことの30％は憶えている 見て聞いたことの50%は憶えている 自分で言ったことの80％は憶えている 自分で言って、したことの90％は憶えている