Power ubiquitously shapes what is learned, how learning happens, and who learners become through learning. In recent years, the centrality of equity and power in learning has been rigorously discussed in the community of the learning sciences, especially as a critical expansion of sociocultural and sociohistorical approaches to learning. This shift in the field not only helps us to examine various contexts of learning that have been previously overlooked, but also fundamentally urges us to reconsider the meaning of learning that has been historically treated as apolitical and non-ideological. In this article, we review the recent development of studies on learning that re-center power, equity, and justice. Our review documents the conceptual shift on learning and discusses major methodological frameworks to study the relationships between power and learning. Based on our review, we maintain that learning can be reconceptualized as socio-environmental design where learners agentively alter the material and ecological functioning and geopolitical mapping of oppression and injustice. Our view of learning as socio-environmental design could open a new horizon on studies on learning, attending to heterogenous and conflicting histories and voices rooted in the particularities of geopolitical environments that have been understudied. Bringing back the central thesis that learning is contextually bound, we call for future studies on learning as socio-environmental design that reflect a macro-micro continuum arising from the geopolitical matrix of power situated in the post-industrial and post-developmental society of Japan.

The goal of this paper is to shed new light on the learning mechanism of second language knowledge in Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Although second language has long been assumed to be teachable as practiced in foreign language classrooms, the effect of negative evidence or corrections is inconclusive yet. The present study addresses a new research question: with no corrections at all, would grammatical error rates of autonomous Japanese EFL learners decline gradually? To answer this question, 71 Japanese EFL learners participated in an experiment of free English writing with no corrective feedback. The results showed that within one academic year, the grammatical error rate was lower in their writing in the second semester compared to the first. This tendency was found in morphosyntactic items with relatively high error rates such as determiners, agreement within a noun phrase, and prepositions. This suggests that second language learners with explicit grammar knowledge can notice and correct their errors by themselves even without explicit teaching, and that the question of to what extent it is the case should be further examined.

ReproducibiliTea Tokyo, a Tokyo branch of a worldwide journal club movement on open and reproducible science, was introduced. We present how it came about, how it operates, and the topics discussed in the past three years since its inception in 2020. We hope the report serves as an example of the management of an online academic community in the post Covid-19 era.

Recently, a multi-lab study has become increasingly popular. It’s one of the empirical study methods where researchers from various regions and cultures around the world conduct research at the same time using the same procedures. This paper discusses how to participate in a multi-lab study, the advantages of the participation, and the problems associated with the participation. First, any researchers can be involved in a multi-lab study and its process is not much different from that of traditional international collaborative studies. Next, it is highlighted that multi-lab studies have greater academic implications than meta-analyses and that providing Japanese data increases the significance of it. Finally, the paper points out that the financial and authorship issues associated with the participation in a multi-lab study should be overcome.