Governance and Expertise in the Teaching Profession - An Analysis of Contemporary Japanese Educational Reforms

Oct 15, 2026

Explores how Japanese school governance reforms affect the teaching profession’s position and the growing difficulties teachers experience. Argues that policies developing teacher quality standards can suppress teachers’ independence while increasing heteronomy. Interprets “educational professionals” as including both researchers and practitioners, and proposes that achieving “expertise in the teaching profession” depends on a four-way governance relationship among researchers, practitioners, citizens, and government administrators.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages12

Reading Time30 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Purpose

Design/Approach/Methods

Findings

Originality/Value

Introduction

Overview of reforms and teacher expertise

Educational governance reforms in contemporary Japan

Governance and shared governance mechanisms

Relativizing the teaching profession

Stakeholders and impacts on teachers

Governance and Expertise in the Teaching Profession: An Analysis of Contemporary Japanese Educational Reforms Hirofumi Hamada University of Tsukuba ECNU Review of Education 2019, Vol. 2(2) 166–177 ª The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: [sagepub.com/journals-permissions](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[ ](sagepub.com/journals-permissions)[DOI: 10.1177/2096531119853085](DOI: 10.1177/2096531119853085)[ ](DOI: 10.1177/2096531119853085)[journals.sagepub.com/home/roe](journals.sagepub.com/home/roe) Abstract Purpose: This article examines the Japanese teaching profession’s position on current school governance reforms in Japan and the difficulties teachers are facing as the reforms progress. Design/Approach/Methods: This article describes how a policy for developing teacher quality standards tends to suppress teacher independence while increasing the heteronomy of the teaching profession. The article discusses how Japan can meet its goal of ensuring “expertise in the teaching profession” by referring to the relationship between “professionalism” and “publicness”in the theories of occupational sociology. Findings: Expertise in the teaching profession is based on a mixture of academic and practical knowledge. Theterm“educational professionals”should be interpretedto include both“researchers”and “practitioners.” A sustainable governance mechanism for the Japanese teaching profession should be built on a four-way relationship among researchers, practitioners, citizens, and government administrators. Originality/Value: This study provides a critical review of a broad-reaching educational policy and proposes a new approach for restructuring the governance of the Japanese teaching profession. Corresponding author: Hirofumi Hamada, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8572 Japan. Email: [hamada@human.tsukuba.ac.jp](hamada@human.tsukuba.ac.jp) Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ([http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/](http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ([https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)). Keywords Autonomy, Japanese education reform, shared governance, teaching profession Date received: 5 December 2018; accepted: 29 April 2019 Introduction This article examines the Japanese teaching profession’s position on current school governance reforms in Japan and the difficulties teachers are facing as the reforms progress. I will first summarize the recent educational governance reforms and discuss how the concept of“expertise in the teaching profession” has become an important policy-making issue in Japan. Next, I will examine how a policy for developing standards to ensure the quality of teachers tends to suppress teacher independence and increases the heteronomy of the teaching profession. I will then discuss an alternative approach through which policymakers can ensure expertise in the teaching profession by referring to the relationship between “professionalism” and “publicness”in the theories of occupational sociology, as well as in science, technology, and society. Educational governance reforms in contemporary Japan Japanese academics frequently use the term “governance” to describe the situation in which traditionally public functions are delegated by the government to various nongovernmental actors. Since the 1980s, this concept of governance has been discussed in various academic disciplines and has become the focus of educational policies in Japan beginning around 1997 . Concrete examples include the implementation of school choice in publ

FAQs

What is the article’s main purpose?

It examines the teaching profession’s position under current Japanese school governance reforms and the difficulties teachers face as reforms progress.

How does the article describe the effect of teacher quality standards policies?

It argues such policies tend to suppress teacher independence and increase heteronomy in the teaching profession.

What governance mechanism does the article propose to sustain teaching expertise?

It proposes a four-way relationship among researchers, practitioners, citizens, and government administrators to build sustainable governance for teaching expertise.

Oct 15, 2026

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