On March 20-21, 2021, the Educational Vision Research Institute (EVRI), in collaboration with the Internal Committee of INEI at Hiroshima University, held a symposium for Peace Education and Lesson Study for Teacher Educator (PELSTE).

【Peace Education Section】

On the first day of PELSTE, the symposium focused on “Peace Education.” With three participants and 60 visitors, the significance and challenges of “Peace Education” were discussed.

Firstly, EVRI Director Kazuhiro Kusahara made a speech and explained the purpose and program of PELSTE 2021. Yasushi Maruyama, coordinator of the PELSTE 2021 Peace Education Section and chair of the INEI Committee, continued the opening remarks. He stated that the symposium would review peace education practices in Hiroshima, which had been distributed in the pre-conference learning materials, from the perspective of each participant’s academic, cultural, and social contexts, and discuss how peace education could be redesigned.

Three participants made their proposals.
Ms. Cecilia Kyalo, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, warned against “reducing history into dualistic polarities” of perpetrators versus victims, and suggested the importance of understanding the complex and ever-changing relationships among actors. She pointed out that the same problem can be seen in the peace education curriculum in Kenya, where peaceful coexistence among ethnic groups is an urgent task. She suggested the importance of encouraging students to listen to the “polyphony” of voices in history. She found this kind of dialogue with different “voices” in the peace education practice at Hiroshima Global Academy (HiGA).
Dr. Kevin Kester of Seoul National University, South Korea made three points. First, to resist modernist thinking – Eurocentricism – and to understand theories from the Southern Hemisphere and the East, without Western thinking. Second, to ensure that an ethical stance against colonial thinking is taken in all dimensions, from educational policy to curriculum practice; and third, to stop treating education as a panacea for peace. He suggested that we should not only look at what ideas are held by whom, and where, but also the specific context and background (time and place) in which such ideas are born.
Ms. Myuri Komaragiri of the University of Toronto, Canada, referred to the challenges of peace education in relation to her own research into refugees and conflict resolution. In particular, she pointed out the problem of formal school education being complicit in “epistemological injustice,” which excludes the knowledge of disadvantaged groups such as refugees. She argued that peace education practices should start from organic social relationships rooted in local wishes and experiences, rather than being forced from the outside. She also emphasized that trusting relationships with marginalized people must be reconstructed, while taking into consideration the burden of reminding survivors of their painful experiences.
In the discussion, Russell Kabir, Takayuki Kawaguchi, and Yasushi Maruyama served as commentators, discussing the challenges of peace education and how to overcome them. In the first half of the discussion it was pointed out that peace education, which is often overly politicized as if it were an act against the state or political actors, is ambivalent, in that it has become an emotional and apolitical educational space inside the classroom. The discussion then continued to multiple dimensions of peace education. At the level of the national curriculum, the question was raised as to how the innumerable “many voices” of history should or could be structured. At the practice level, other questions were raised, such as whether the specific values of teachers, e.g. “anti-nuclear,” should be hidden or could be transmitted as the voice from a subject. Throughout the discussion, the importance was confirmed of keeping many narratives heard from history. The importance of reconstructing the image of peace from marginalized voices was proposed, in order to repoliticize peace education practice.

In the latter half of the discussion, the participants of the lesson study section, Dr. Agnaldo Arroio (University of Sao Paulo), Ms. Indira Subramanian (Nanyang Technological University), and Ms. Kaycee Rogers (University of Wisconsin-Madison) also participated in the discussion. They pointed out the need to find a way to transform ideal peace education into practice.

【Lesson Study Section】

The symposium on the second day of PELSTE, which focused on “Lesson Study,” was held with three participants and 86 audience members to discuss the significance and challenges of Lesson Study.
Firstly, EVRI Director Kazuhiro Kusahara made a speech and explained the purpose and program of PELSTE 2021. Nariakira Yoshida, coordinator of the Lesson Study Section of PELSTE 2021, continued by stating the purpose and activities of the Lesson Study Section, which was to exchange opinions on the significance and challenges of Lesson Study from the perspective of each participant’s personal, cultural, and social contexts, based on the common question, “How and with whom do you want to share Lesson Study?”

Three participants made their proposals.
Dr. Agnaldo Arroio of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, based on his participation in PELSTE 2020, found in the Japanese tradition of Lesson Study “autonomy and teacher ownership” with a “prosumer” aspect, and the “school as an educational community” that includes many actors. He proposed to share his Lesson Study with the people of Piauí, Brazil. As that region has many schools, teachers, and children in culturally and socially “vulnerable” circumstances, he proposed a path to empower teachers through the transformation of in-service education programs and the formation of school communities.
Ms. Indira Subramanian of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, began by describing her own teaching experience in India. She pointed out that Lesson Study can be a sustainable response to the structural and systemic challenges of the Indian teacher education system. In particular, she suggested “six questions” to go through when starting a Lesson Study project in a new place, and emphasized the importance of democratic collaboration and cooperation among teachers. Finally, by going through these questions, she raised the importance of recontextualizing Lesson Study as a Japanese heritage into local contexts full of the cultural and social demands, and the need to overcome “educational borrowing” that ignores these contexts.
Ms. Kaycee Rogers, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, discussed the significance and challenges of Lesson Study considering the status of teacher training in the United States. Based on her experience as a teacher and researcher interested in learner-centered teaching theory, she proposed the importance of repeating the cycle of class practice, critique, and improvement. She pointed out that the significance of Lesson Study is that it enables collaboration with various stakeholders. It is not limited to the conventional framework of teacher training carried out by a triad of university teachers, supervisors, and trainees. In particular, she emphasized interdisciplinary teacher interaction and pointed out the possibility of capturing students’ learning from multi-layered perspectives.

The discussion was facilitated by Brett Walter and Jongsung Kim. It focused on a controversy: that Lesson Study has become an “educational formula”. The importance of cultural “recontextualization,” which was strongly reflected in the three speakers’ proposals, and concrete ways to achieve it were discussed, as well as how to “measure” success.
Cecilia Kyalo, Kevin Kester, and Myuri Komaragiri, the participants in the Peace Education Section, also joined the discussion. They argued that Lesson Study has the great advantage in “systematizing” teachers’ educational experiences, and that it has potential to transform black box classroom practices into objects of teachers’ collaborative inquiry, and, through this inquiry, to “discover” the existence of diverse cultures brought into the classroom by children and teachers, and finally to “connect” them to classroom development. On the other hand, further questions were raised about the consideration of “context” that cannot be avoided in the intercultural development of Lesson Study. The following matters were specifically raised: how to avoid reducing the complexity of different cultures in the process of such “well-systemized” Lesson Study, how to motivate new actors to engage in Lesson Study, and how Lesson Study can be connected to teacher well-being. Throughout the discussion, the importance of critically questioning the “success” narratives that are often promised in Lesson Study was confirmed.
Finally, Dr. Norio Matsumi, Dean of the Department of Education, Hiroshima University, gave the closing remarks. EVRI, the organizer of PELSTE 2021, will continue to develop the front line of Peace Education and Lesson Study in the coming years.

You can see the commentaries by three participants that will be presented during the seminar.

Agnaldo Arroio’s Commentary	Indira Subramanian’s Commentary	Kaycee Rogers’s Commentary

4．PELSTE2021の成果