In Japan, the growing number of children with foreign roots is making the country’s classrooms increasingly multicultural in nature. Faced with the challenge of teaching students from different cultural backgrounds, teachers are reassessing their ideas of “fairness.”
There is consequently a need both for consideration of organized policy initiatives that map out a new framework for teacher training and for teachers themselves to reconsider exactly what they have regarded and practiced as being fair to date.
In this paper, teachers’ attitudes and ideas on judgments of fairness are reported, and their perspectives are examined based on case studies of Japanese teachers’ interpretations of fairness and what they judge to be fair.
This provides the platform for a discussion of the following issues in teacher training:
(1) Questioning of conceptions of “fairness” considered self-evident to date
Teachers’ interpretations of fairness need to be reconfigured. In other words, teachers themselves need to relativize and revisit those conceptions of fairness that they have until now considered axiomatic, reconsider their own cognitive frameworks, and acquire new frameworks.
(2) Exploration of the fluidity of judgments of fairness and underlying factors
The criteria and significance of judgments of fairness not only change according to historical, economic, and sociocultural circumstances, such as differences in social and interpersonal structure, they also fluctuate dynamically in the context of interpersonal relations. Teacher training therefore needs to be adapted to develop teachers’ capacity to understand the interplay of these various factors.
