| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,600,000)
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| Research Abstract |
The theme of this research project is the designing of project-based learning through integrating the curriculum at a public elementary school in Osaka. The designing of project-based learning is based on the concept of expansive learning whose object is the societal productive practice or the social real world. The object of expansive learning is the construction and the application of knowledge and skills. In the light of activity theory, we are trying to create a new, expanded pedagogic structure of learning activity and advance networks of learning that transcend institutional boundaries and turn the school into a collaborative agent of change. Therefore, our project is closely concerned with expansive learning in teachers' work and their development in school changes. In this sense, our project is based on a teacher-initiated, bottom-up communication approach at the school site.
The project utilizes the methodological tools of intervention research. We implemented such sessions in a school as an attempt to facilitate the teachers' collective efforts to analyze, reflect, criticize, and discuss their existing work and organizations. The findings of our project clearly show that the temporal structure of discrete lessons and relatively short standardized work time sequences are the central problems to solve for collaborative curriculum work of project-based learning through integrated curriculums. Moreover, based on our analysis of the project, it is imperative to overcome schools that function as encapsulated units. Project-based learning that integrates curriculums and goes beyond the transmission of predefined knowledge and skills requires new roles for teachers to stimulate, facilitate, and mediate their children's interactions. It uses a broad spectrum of learning resources and a variety of human and material recourses to create advanced social networks of learning with people outside the school who are actively engaged in it.
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