Pro Seminar - Review #1

Reading Review #1

 Japanese physical educators’ beliefs on teaching students with disabilities at urban high schools

            I chose this study because my TAB placement is in Tokyo and I felt it would be important to have an understanding of the cultural backdrop. In particular, I wanted to find some research that revealed to a measurable degree how Japanese people feel towards practicing inclusion, since that is the focus of this term’s work. While my placement is actually not in a Japanese public – like the article focuses on – but in an international school with mostly Canadian teachers, I still feel that the cultural influences upon labelling children are important. My students go home every night to Japanese communities, families, and homes in Saitama, and are therefore under far more influence of these values than whatever takes place during school hours. Readings like this one can therefore help me develop habits in the classroom that will benefit the students who do need extra support, while still respecting Japanese customs and beliefs about disabilities, and education in a broader sense.

            The study collected a set of teachers’ beliefs about the inclusion of students with disabilities in physical education classes. After the data was collected, the authors then categorized the results into four areas of concern. To be clear, there wasn’t a single teacher in the study who fully supported the idea of integrated classrooms for P.E. Taken directly from the study’s conclusion was the observation that, “Their beliefs varied from non-acceptance to modest acceptance when teaching students with disabilities.” (Hodge, 2009) The authors divided the participants’ responses into these four groups or themes;

1.      Teaching practice troubled

2.      Dependant self-efficacy

3.      Paradoxes

4.      Motives

            In each of these categories, I read the concerns of the teachers while looking critically for anything that could be considered an important cultural influence. In some cases, teachers made specific mention that they were uncomfortable having students with disabilities in their classroom because it brought out a competitive quality in the other students, and their parents. In the case of category one – the troubled teaching practice – one teacher mentioned that grading a student with a disability was often the point of conflict. Parents of students without a disability would question the teacher why their son or daughter had received a certain grade in comparison to a student with a disability. Additional explanation of this conflict was that Japanese society is heavily geared toward academic success, of which ALL classes in public school play a part. Parents would them complain in the case that a student with a disability received a grade equal to that of a student without a disability, who had clearly performed better during assessments.

            A second concern in this theme was that some teachers mentioned the student with a disability’s psychological safety. Every time I’ve come to a Japanese school, I have heard about the problems of teasing and bullying. I wonder to what extent the participants of this study were referring to this problem when mentioning the psychological safety of the students with disabilities?

            When talking about teacher efficacy, the study made the statement that there is a fear in Japan or being ‘different.’ As an outsider with only a handful of experiences in the culture, I can say this was made noticeable to me several times. In such a homogeneous society as Japan, the slightest difference in skin color, hair style, leg shape, or body type can cast a child into a certain self-image for years, if not for life. While teaching in Wakayama city for the public school board, I had many odd yet interesting conversations with students and teachers about the nature or character or certain students. For example, student with a very slightly longer nose could easily be nicknamed ‘Pinocchio’, and the difference could be pointed out to the degree of bullying. A case of bullying may not be uncommon in Canada – or anywhere – but the frequency of it is something that I’ll always remember. Additionally, in the case of something like a particular student’s nose, the ‘difference’ is so insignificant to an outsider, the comments I heard often surprised me because they were nothing I would ever have noticed unaided. In other words, the boy’s nose was literally only 1mm or 2mm longer than his classmates. What I took away from these conversations certainly agrees with the statement the study makes; any difference, no matter how relatively insignificant it is to someone from another culture, is not only consistently noticed here in Japan, but is often accompanied with a judgement. In this context, the participant teacher named Misaki said,

            “I struggle to teach PE to those students [with disabilities], because all students with disabilities do not like PE. They verbally communicate to me that “I do not want to participate in PE”.” (Hodge, 2009)

            In the conclusion of the study, the authors recorded that several teachers in the Japanese education system believed in inclusion because it allowed students’ ‘seishin’, or spirit, to expose itself to teachers and classmates. This is believed to lead to a greater sense of well-being for the student, and is directly equated to mental or spiritual toughness. If values like this are also present in Japanese culture, it suggests that inclusion is still not an open and shut case.

  Work Cited

Hodge, T. S. (2009). Japanese physical educators’ beliefs on teaching students. Asia Pacific Journal of Education , 159-177.