Abstract
Today, with the current academic-centered school education and the resulting maladjustment
to school and repeated incidents of self-injury and other harm, the possibility of caring is being
sought as a principle for educational restructuring. In this paper, I focused on the practice of
Japanese language education in junior high schools, and analyzed and discussed the research
questions with the aim of clarifying the structure of curriculum design in order to bring Nel
Noddings' caring theory into educational practice. The following three points are the results of
this paper. First, we clarified the design of Noddings' universal curriculum. Secondly, it was
found that Noddings' universal curriculum functions as a framework for considering the
selection of teaching materials and the selection and arrangement of learning contents to be
used in Japanese language education practice. In addition, the "from inside to outside" order of
the universal curriculum, which consists of concentric circles, was proven to function as the
order for selecting teaching materials and learning contents, which was not explicitly stated in
the Courses of Study. Thirdly, it was shown that there are parts of the universal curriculum and
the Courses of Study that are not fully captured by both Noddings' universal curriculum and
the Courses of Study, and that the dialectical development of the two can lead to the enrichment
of the Japanese language education curriculum.
