Decolonising the curriculum in Japanese language education in the UK and Europe

Umezawa, Kaoru, Fujita, Tomoko, Narumi-Munro, Fumiko, Ofune, Chisato, Tomatsuri, Akiko and Yonezawa, Chieko (2025) Decolonising the curriculum in Japanese language education in the UK and Europe. Language Learning in Higher Education, 15 (1). pp. 321-333. ISSN 2191-6128

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Abstract

In recent years, “Decolonising the Curriculum (DtC)” has been widely discussed and advocated in the European educational landscape as part of inclusive education. However, few examples of its practice in Japanese language teaching have been reported. While discussions of DtC in Japan often focus on the context of Japan’s former colonies, this context does not apply to Japanese language education in Europe, where Japanese is positioned as a minority language, thus a target for inclusion. Considering these complex contexts, we conducted a survey of Japanese teachers to understand the position and goal of DtC for Japanese language education in Europe. This report primarily investigates how Japanese language teachers in Europe perceive and implement the concept of decolonisation in their teaching. The project highlighted the complexity of DtC within Japanese language education in the UK and Europe, where both the perspectives of the coloniser and the colonised are present. Our findings revealed a range of practices for reviewing power dynamics in the classroom to make education more inclusive, whether respondents intended DtC or not; there were different ways of understanding DtC. We hope that this initiative will provide an opportunity for further discussion of DtC in the teaching of languages other than English.