Purposes and Challenges of Super Global High School (SGH) program

• In Event: Internationalization of education in Japan: challenges and opportunities

Proposal

The current major educational reforms in the secondary education in Japan focus on fostering global leaders. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) has developed a five-year program called Super Global High School (SGH) and started implementing in the designated 112 high schools between 2014 and 2015. The SGH program enriches Japanese high school students to have critical thinking skills, global perspectives, and resilience through conducting research in collaboration with universities, corporations, and the community (MEXT, 2016). For example, university professors teach a part of the high school project, and universities invite prospect students from high schools. Moreover, the students from SGH program have opportunities to present their research at universities and receive feedback from professors and graduate students.
The aim of the SGH program is connecting global competence, which has been emphasized in lessons in Japanese high schools. According to OECD (2018), global competence refers to “the capacity to examine local, global and intercultural issues, to understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others” (p. 1). Students in the SGH program are able to become the global individuals who carry open-mindedness and enable having effective interactions with diverse people.
However, there are some challenges of conducting the SGH program. One of major challenges is that SGH program seems to focus on benefits for students of only Japanese citizens even though there are quite number of students who have different cultural backgrounds, such as Japanese language learners (JLLs) and culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students in the SGH program. Global human resources imply only Japanese citizens, who have Japanese nationality and speak Japanese language. Interestingly enough, students with more than two cultures and speak more than two languages are not regarded as global human resources.
In the SGH project, students conduct research on foreign countries, and some CLD students should be able to work effectively by utilizing their own backgrounds. However, some CLD students are still in the process of acquiring Japanese language, and they have a hard time to work on the projects without support from teachers and their peers.
Based on the previous study (Shimojima, 2018), the findings suggest that some teachers in the SGH program were eager to teach in inquiry-based learning styles, but other teachers were reluctant to teach in unconventional styles. The SGH project is in itself an opportunity for professional development for teachers. However, teachers still need their own professional development for teaching how to conduct student research projects in a student diverse population.
The SGH program brings opportunities for high school students to develop their critical thinking and global perspectives; this will foster global leaders. The SGH program will end in 2020 after the Tokyo Olympics. MEXT (2018) has proposed to continue having an advanced different program for fostering global and regional leaders. To evaluate challenges in the current SGH program, high school students including CLD and JLL will benefit from the advanced internationalization program in the future.

Author

• Yasuko Shimojima, Tokyo Gakugei University