Teachers’ Baton Project as a Catalyst for Change

• In Event: Activism and Education Change (I)

Proposal

Recently, negative reports about teaching as a career in Japan appeared in the media, among which the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) (2022)’s report regarding a shortage of teachers at public schools was the most alarming. The MEXT’s attempt to spur young people’s interest in becoming teachers received overwhelmingly negative reactions from the teachers themselves. In addition, the social media it used became a platform for expressing the teachers’ appeals for work style reform to the government. The purpose of this study is to examine how social media communication is used to bridge the gap between the priorities of the teachers and the government, as well as why it has a possibility of influencing schools.

Social media (Twitter, later renamed X) communication is examined based on content analysis. Content analysis is a linguistic and systematic technique for coding sentences into content categories. NVIVO is used to facilitate this methodology. Such analysis provides a quantitative description of the content of communication (Berelson, 1952), which enables “making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying special characteristics of messages (Holsti, 1968)” in the corpus data. It can also be used to compare and contrast messages of different groups of people.

The government’s initial intention and the actual outcome of the Teachers’ Baton Project are analyzed using McGinn’s (1994) politics of educational planning framework. McGinn (1994) states that the education planning is increasingly understood as a process by which disparate groups can join to achieve consensus about goals and effective means to achieve them. The implementation of formal plans often fails because of the exclusion of political objectives of planners, employees, or other actors. Therefore, planning should include political decision-making to bring about effective change.

The Teachers’ Baton Project is a campaign to inform people aspiring to become teachers by asking the teachers already in the classrooms to tell positive stories and their passion for education. However, many teachers expressed the severe working environment at schools instead. Government officials rarely hear the voice of teachers directly. Whether intended or not, this platform offered an excellent opportunity to communicate with them without any mediators such as local boards of education.

The findings indicate that the Teachers’ Baton Project shows a sign of influence on essential reform. The provisional reform includes shifting some extracurricular activities at schools to community activities and discussing a fundamental revision of the system to renew teaching licenses, which currently requires teachers to take a renewal course once every ten years to reduce the teachers’ burden. If successful educational planning requires the inclusion of planners (government), employees (teachers), and other stakeholders (students, families, and communities), the outcome of this project seems promising.

This study focused on a case study in Japan. However, multiple case studies might produce more general results. In addition, other groups of people might find this sort of communication platform as a place to express their concerns, communicate directly, and gain opportunities for change.

Author

• Mie Shigemitsu, Osaka University of Economics