2022 Volume 44 Issue 2 Pages 112-117
This roundtable featured two internship programs as liberal education. Internships require a certain level of maturity that is lacking in the knowledge and skills provided by major and vocational education, such as compassion, insight, and communication skills. We discussed the importance of liberal education for the holistic development of students.
By discussing the “studentsʼ self-directed learning” in 2019 and “the idea of lack” in 2020, we recognized that certain gaps exist in the major-driven curriculum (Kinukawa, 2015). We examined the gaps in liberal education, which can be fulfilled through learning experiences, both in and extra curriculum.
Report 1: The D-Internship program aims at collaboration and co-creation between small and medium-sized companies and students from multiple universities in Takahashi River area, Okayama. The programʼs goal was regional development aimed at revitalizing and fostering the local human resources and eventually enabling these human resources to settle in the region.
Report 2: Nagoya University of Commerce & Business is developing an internship program as the field-method of commerce education. This experimental internship revealed the following two concerns through an evaluation by both the company and the university: (1) the most important issue is evidence-based, and (2) students do not have the kind of expertise that people in the industry naturally have. In the process where the students were given a challenge in a company and found a solution through university learning, the faculty who planned this program observed a higher level of the “studentsʼ self-directed learning” than expected.
