A Holistic Vision of Curriculum Integration:

From the Japanese Perspective

Koji Matsunobu

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Introduction

Curriculum integration has been an interest and concern of arts educators over the past two decades. It lives up to the expectations of educators who see splits in the traditional curriculum—splits between the intellectual and the sensory, between the democratic and the elite, between contents and procedures, and between disciplinary knowledge and personal knowledge (Burnaford, Aprill, & Weiss, 2001; Matsunobu, 2005). The arts are expected to bridge these divides and provide a fullness of understanding (Lees, 1994), for the arts facilitate a deeper level of cognitive and emotional engagement (Eisner, @@@@) and embodied understanding of a curriculum through whole senses (Bresler, 2004, Narrative Paper; Irwin, Wilson, Grauer, de Cosson, 2005). The arts also involve one’s construction of personal, social, cultural, and national identities (Hargreaves et al., 2002, 2003; Olson, in press).

Imperative demands for curriculum integration have been identified in many countries, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Ghana, Kenya, Canada, the United States, Greece, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and others (Bresler, 1995, 2003; Russell & Zembylas, in press; McPherson, 1995; Livemore & McPherson, 1998; Chrysostomou, 2004; Lindstrom, 1997; Flolu, 2000; Opondo, 2000). Each country has its own curriculum policy. Implementations of arts integration manifest culturally imbedded views of what is appropriate knowledge and how it should be acquired. Practices of curriculum integration reveal not only epistemological views of knowledge but also distinctive socio-cultural and political contexts of education.

In Japan, curriculum integration has been promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (hereafter Ministry of Education) as part of educational reform at both the national and local levels. It was once viewed as an eye-catching policy shift by Japanese educators toward progressive education centered on holistic, situated teaching and learning of subject matters and life skills. Despite many burdens loaded on the shoulders of each teacher, the enforcement itself has made positive impacts on Japanese curriculum policy making and practices of arts education. Such positive effects, as explained later, are identified through the roles of decentralizing and liberating arts education policy making and curriculum decisions. Curriculum integration policy, in return, has opened up a space that allows for the expansion of the scope of—and the transformation of—arts teaching and learning.

Despite many positive impacts of integrated curriculum on the transformation of Japanese education, the policy is expected to shift soon; and the program for integrated studies is to be reduced, as well, for the same reason that integrated education and arts education in many other countries have been cut: concern over standardized test scores. This shift also comes along with the depreciation of the arts in the school curriculum as the neo-liberalist back-to-basic movement posits curriculum integration and arts education as being in opposition with academic studies. Facing this split, arts educators are to give away the potential of the arts to be part of students’ school lives and advocate the positioning of the arts in relation to academic subjects.

I propose in this paper that a holistic vision of integration that is rooted in traditional and indigenous values of Japanese education may provide a powerful rationale for supporting the arts within the curriculum. Educational reform based on indigenous cultural values has been explored by educational leaders in other countries. In Ghana, for example, curriculum integration is a form of decolonization that tries to deconstruct the European model of subject separation and promote a curriculum that is based on the traditional view of cosmology and knowledge (Flolu, 2000). Elsewhere in Africa, efforts are geared toward integrating traditional, ethnically based indigenous practices with modern scientific and technological developments based on Western cultural values (Opondo, 2000). What are indigenous values in Japan, and how do they potentially promote integration? Throughout the discussion, it becomes clear that integration is one of the cultural themes in Japan and that the traditional values of holistic, humanistic education should be put forth as the foundation for curriculum integration in Japan.

I first shed light on the positioning of music and the integrated curriculum in the Japanese context and highlight the policy and practices of an integrated curriculum involving the arts. Throughout my investigation, comparative perspectives are employed based on my case study work on arts integration in the United States and Japan. This comparative approach helps delineate the unique characters of the Japanese version of an integrated curriculum and indigenous values of education, especially from the viewpoint of specialist and generalist cultures. I finally elicit some implications and recommendations for an establishment of a holistic vision of arts integration.

Positioning of the Arts and Integrated Education in Japanese Schools

In Japan, where the centralized government has strong power of control over educational policy making, the Ministry of Education secures a minimum amount of time and budget for arts instruction. This is to say that three to four hours of instruction time for curriculum integration per week are set apart from individual classes of each subject throughout the country. Music and art teachers generally do not have to compete with other teachers to secure time for individual arts instruction because one to two hours of instruction time are allocated for it. Given this situation, almost no research on extrinsic values of arts learning exists in Japan because there is little advocacy need (and thus research) to support the arts and arts integration.

Generally speaking, the arts are more integrated into school activities in Japan than in the United States.[1] For instance, a number of school events involving students’ musical activities are noticeable in Japanese schools, examples of which are a school chorus contests, graduation ceremonies, and cultural festivals. Unlike in the United States, the tension between discipline-based teaching and integrated teaching, or the friction between “arts-as-disciplines” and “arts-as-handmaidens” (Russell & Zembylas, in press), is less obvious. Also less obvious is the dichotomous view that assumes that schools have to choose one or the other (Brewer, 2002).

The status of the arts being equivalent and comparable to that of academic subjects in schools allows for the implementation of different types of arts integration. Japanese teachers are generally less interested in integrating arts with academic subjects.[2] Rather, they are concerned about student-initiated activities when it comes to designing integrated projects. One particular example of integrated curriculum is sogotekina gakushu no jikan (integrated course), one of the new curriculum areas sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, introduced in 1998 and first officially implemented in schools in 2002.[3]

The main objectives of integrated courses are to encourage students to engage in self-learning and to develop skills involving problem-finding and -solving in real-life situations. The Japanese Ministry of Education specifies the aims of integrated courses as to the following three points:

(1) To develop the aptitude and ability to find questions for oneself, investigate them independently, and solve them in a better way.

(2) To acquire ways of learning and thinking, cultivate the attitude to engage independently and creatively in activities of problem solving and exploring, and be able to think about one’s life.

(3) To connect knowledge and skills acquired in all the curriculum areas (including subject areas, moral education, and special activities) and utilize them in one’s own learning and life in a way that they work interconnectedly. [This aim was not initially included.]

Japanese scholars in curriculum integration tend to refer to Dewey’s theory of experience and Vygotsky’s constructivist approach with emphasis on the project approach and students’ active involvements in the learning process (Kato, 1997; Takaura, 1997). Discussions on discipline-based integration (Drake, 1993) or integration for interdisciplinary understandings (Gardner & Boix-Mansilla, 1993) are hardly observed in the discourse of Japanese curriculum integration.[4] Rather, the literature tends to discuss student-centered integration, the type closest to Beane’s (1997) definition of curriculum integration. Beane believes that children develop their own knowledge when they are engaged in real-life issues in a contextually rich environment. Curriculum integration for Beane is “concerned with enhancing the possibilities for personal and social integration through the organization of curriculum around significant problems and issues, collaboratively identified by educators and young people, without regard for subject-area boundaries” (p.v). This student-oriented integration emphasizes the active role of learners in developing, personalizing, and applying knowledge. Interestingly, whereas American teachers in my study tended to believe that teachers, not students, should decide what to approach and how to combine subject matters, a similar assertion was not found in the Japanese literature (Matsunobu, 2004a, 2004b, 2005).

Typical activities in integration classes at the lower elementary school level are, for example, feeding pigs, planting vegetables, visiting a nursing home, and interacting with distant people through the Internet. In addition to these remnants from progressive education, four major areas are proposed by the government as examples for ideal integrated projects: (1) international understanding, (2) welfare, (3) information, and (4) the environment. During implementation, arts educators discussed how their roles might support and enhance each new area of the curriculum. Examples of arts inclusion are teaching multicultural arts in a series of international education units, giving musical performances in nursing homes as part of welfare education, studying/sharing/exhibiting art works through the Internet, and promoting and engaging in soundscape activities.[5] There are numerous anecdotes and self-reports of successful practices of arts integration by school teachers, such as the ones in a special 1999 issue of a music educator’s journal, Kyoiku Ongaku. A school-based operetta production that involves students’ creation of a story, choreography, music, and costumes for a school performance is also a frequently found example of an interdisciplinary art project.

The post-2002 Japanese national curriculum consists of two areas of focus: disciplinary and integrated courses. Its special feature is the syncretism of the different traditions of approaches. The Ministry of Education specifies that the integrated course should be associated and, if possible, paralleled with disciplinary studies of each subject. This curriculum formation is expected to be in place until the next curriculum policy review results in change. However, it is a common understanding among scholars and teachers that this program will be reduced soon for the concern over standardized test scores. As is the case, however, there is almost no research in Japan that supports any relationship between students’ engagement in integrated programs and the decline in their academic achievement.

Impacts of Integration

Since the onset of integrated studies, positive effects have been reported and confusion has been experienced by teachers who ended up conducting the programs with little preparation. In the Japanese context, impacts of curriculum integration are identified as follows.

Traditionally, given the state power over curriculum decisions, Japanese school teachers have abided by and followed the national curriculum. The new course for integrated studies enables them to engage in curriculum designing of project-based, creative activities because no content standards are developed and specified by the Ministry of Education for evaluation. Teachers are expected not to depend on ready-made lessons or prescriptive recipes but to arrange creative and integrative activities according to students’ needs and interests. Due to this new responsibility for reflexive teaching, the role of teachers has shifted from that of curriculum executors to curriculum designers (Sato, @@@@). For the first time in the post-WWII period, the responsibility of curriculum decisions was left to the local level and each school. In other words, the implementation of integrated courses was to promote the “decentralization” of curriculum policy making and practices through the power shift from the central government to local schools.

Deconstruction of the traditional curriculum was another impact being brought by the integration policy that came along with arts partnerships that promote teachers’ collaborations with local people who have special expertise. Music educators were particularly interested in inviting specialists in traditional Japanese music. This was because most Japanese music educators generally did not have sufficient knowledge and skills to play and teach traditional Japanese music (Ogawa, @@@@), although Japanese music was already one of the required musical genres specified by the Ministry of Education. Traditionally, school music teachers (and university professors in music) have been trained in the system of Western music, and musicians of other kinds of music (including traditional Japanese music) have been estranged from schools. Arts partnership made it possible for school music teachers to invite groups of local Japanese musicians. This positive impact of the integrated curriculum was thus identified as it enabled music teachers to deconstruct and decolonize the traditionally Westernized music education curriculum by allowing elements of Japanese music and other kinds of music to be taught by local musicians in integrated classes through the arts partnerships.

Furthermore, integrated projects have contributed to the expansion of the traditional scope of school education by incorporating new areas of interest. Such areas potentially include ecology, the environment, peace, gender, equity, technology, discrimination, globalization, and so forth, which have been excluded from the traditional curriculum (Sato, 1996). The scope of music education itself has expanded in the past decade, embracing new concerns in soundscape (Torigoe, @@@@), international and local issues, and technology (Kato, @@@@), as part of integrated studies. This expansion toward interdisciplinary approaches to music is expected to continue further if the integrated education policy is to sustain and the course for integrated studies is to hold its position within the Japanese curriculum.

In sum, the course for integrated studies has created a space for Japanese music and art teachers to engage in creative projects in which they are able to organize interdisciplinary and student-centered education. It may change the closed-school culture with its emphasis on teachers’ responsibilities in flexible curriculum designing and collaborative work involving local people, an emphasis that was not supported within the traditional curriculum framework. Teachers are now highly encouraged to pay attention to emergent local needs as well as interdisciplinary aspects of music beyond its sonic phenomena. Each may bring new insights into the practices of music education and promote the decentralization, decolonization, and deconstruction of the Japanese curriculum.