Over the past two decades, formative assessment, which encourages students and teachers to collaboratively improve their learning, has received increasing international attention.  Influential for the paradigm shift from formative evaluation to formative assessment has been Royce Sadler’s 1989 article, regarded as one of the theoretical foundations of formative assessment.  Recently, however, Sadler has begun to develop radical criticism of current international trends in formative assessment; he now distances himself from some of their key features.  To elucidate why this paradoxical situation has arisen, this article critically reviews the works of Sadler against the backdrop of the global developments of formative assessment and identifies the key essences of his proposals.  In particular, it foregrounds the two central propositions of Sadler’s work; (1) students need to develop their evaluative expertise which enables their self-monitoring in complex and higher-order learning contexts, and (2) such expertise can only be developed through direct authentic evaluative experience under the guidance of skilled experts, as part of an apprentice and inductive process.  What emerges through this discussion is a new insight that Sadler’s scholarship attempts to open up “the connoisseurship approach” in formative assessment.  This aspect of Sadler’s work has been overlooked in the global movements towards formative assessment, and it captures the fundamental epistemological difference that underpins Sadler’s criticism towards the international trends.

 Because of the loss of common values caused by social secularity and pluralism, school education was forced to develop student’s ethical and moral attitudes.  This tendency was notable in Germany since 1970s.  Value education was emphasized due to social and political demands of preventing problematic behavior of young people.  Heitger criticized the trend to develop “attitude” in education.  The purpose of this paper is to seek the theoretical background of his criticism and to find his proposal of alternative value education.  Through this process, this paper argues the value education based on the relationship of “knowledge and attitude”.  To achieve this purpose, three research questions were investigated.  First, what was the social background in his criticism? Second, what is the details of his criticism and the theoretical rationale? And finally, through these social and theoretical background, what did he propose as alternative to development of attitude?  Heitger’s criticism and proposal were based on his theory of “Morality and Bildung (Moralität und Bildung)”, which was affected by Petzelt’s theory that “knowledge” and “attitude”, which are subordinated to ego, are distinct but interrelated.  Based on this theory, Heitger argued that cognition caused questions about attitudes in the rational court, which was the internal judgement institution.  In conclusion he asserted the impossibility to teach ethical and moral attitude and proposed the interactive instruction to guide to cognitive questions. 

 In this article, I discuss the potential for adopting the new materialist perspective in educational research.  In social science and the humanities, agency has been regarded as a property of humans who are capable of reflexivity.  The material has been separated from the human because only the latter has causality.  In recent years, social constructionism has focused on the micro processes of children’s learning about the complicated relationship between the material and the human.  In this approach, the material is connected with human the only in so far as it represents meaningful tools for the user.  This approach thus emphasizes only discursive interactions.  The new materialism, based on postconstructivism, aims to overcome the dichotomy between the material and the human.  New materialists view the material and the human symmetrically and recognize additional actors in social communication by including nonhuman agents.  They understand associations consisting of multimodal agents as assemblages in which all agents engage in intra-action.  Their focus is on becoming, apart from typical development.  The researchers cut off data from practices and produce new knowledge by entangling themselves with data.  The flattened plane of the new materialism allows researchers to understand positive aspects of learning among children who were negatively assessed before, and to produce knowledge which was previously overlooked.  This draws the line of flight from the normalized educational theory. 

The purpose of this paper is to identify the characteristics and modern significance of “diversity education” constructed by Annedore Prengel based on the critical considerations given by Prengel regarding German pedagogy until the late 1980’s. In Germany, the concept of “diversity” in the context of pedagogy has been a topic of study, especially since the 1980’s, and has been developed as “diversity education.” In this paper, the characteristics of “diversity education” that were presented by Prengel to improve the problems in traditional German pedagogy until the late 1980’s are divided into the following two viewpoints.

First, she considered the commonality of the three pedagogical movements, intercultural education, feminist pedagogy, and integration education, which have been studied separately after the 1970s. As a result, she pointed out that children are driven into “horns of a dilemma” by traditional pedagogy, and she proposed a form of thinking of “difference aimed at equality.”

Second, she developed a theory of approval in pedagogy, the foundation of “diversity education.”In this paper, the following points are clarified. Prengel argues that “diversity” is variable, it explains something ambiguous as being socially created, and it cannot be defined. The fact that “diversity” cannot be defined means that there is a necessity for teachers to approve children in an intersubjective relationship, and there should be a “time for liberty” to respect unpredictable child activities. This leads to the expertise of the teachers. Improvement of expertise of the teacher who respect “diversity” is indispensable in order for practical “diversity education” to be sketched and to penetrate Inclusive Education.

 This study focuses on the works of Sadahiko Fujioka and Toshio Nakauchi in 1970s and 80s Japan and aims to clarify their ideas as community-based environmental education.  Firstly, the commonality and difference in their conception on education were discussed.  Then, the differences in their ideas on environmental education were demonstrated.  Lastly, I examined how these differences were embodied and how the different ways of “community-based” were realized in several practices.  Both Fujioka and Nakauchi’s ideas include a philosophy that the lives of students be reflected in education by being “community-based”.  And then the reflection of students’ lives link to the reforming of school education.  However, both who should be the subject and what should be the object of school reformation differ between Fujioka and Nakauchi’s ideas.  For Fujioka, community is important both in terms of guaranteeing students’ human-formation and in terms of adult learning, including all who live in this community.  The practice of environmental education is a collaborative effort among various agencies in the community.  And when school education is reconsidered, it is not only about the content of school education, but also about education systems and facilities.  For Nakauchi, on the other hand, the community is a place where students can experience social and natural phenomena through abundant materials, and it is important to examine whether the current educational objectives of school education are effective as conceptual filters.  In this way, both Fujioka’s and Nakauchi’s ideas on environmental education are characterized as a critical perspective on school education.  Therefore, environmental education is more than a type of activity or a single curriculum; it is a principle of rethinking school education.

　 This paper examines Ren Totsuka’s life education theory and practice in the 1930s, which aimed to teach science and public good to children.  Many of the previous studies have been based on Totsuka’s post-war reminiscences, so they have been unable to grasp details of prewar practices.  Furthermore, they have only dealt with the status of Yoshibei Nomura’s successor and community education practices outside schools.  This paper examines the differences between Totsuka’s theory and Nomura’s theory and analyzes the uniqueness of Totsuka’s practice based on his prewar records.  

　Both Nomura and Totsuka have discussed the importance of public good.  Nomura considered public good to be self-evident and rejected the notion that children would exhibit selfish behaviors.  However, Totsuka assumed that children tended to behave selfishly and tried to make them consider the cause of this selfishness in order to encourage them to be aware of public good.  In his instruction, Totsuka often used writing.  Totsuka’s instructions on writing can be categorized as follows: free writing and a new type of writing known as subject writing.  Children were encouraged to gather a variety of observations, think rationally based on the observations, and collectively confirm rationality of the thinking.  Totsuka hoped to enable children to think scientifically and to develop an awareness of public good.  Furthermore, Totsuka’s practice also included a class newspaper activity, which helped the children to deal with various problems arising from their classroom life as their own problems. 

  The purpose of this paper is to clarify the theory of civic education at Nara Women’s Higher Normal School attached elementary school in the early Showa Era based on Rokuro Iwase’s theory and practice.  In previous studies, Iwase has been analyzed from the viewpoint of “life training” and “life education” based on integrated learning, but it has not been examined from the viewpoint of how the lesson plan was embodied by “civil education” which is the key to the theory of Nara Women’s Higher Normal School attached elementary school.  Therefore, in this paper, based on the discussion in the magazine “Study of Learning” of Nara Women’s Higher Normal School attached elementary school, the theory and practice of civic education in Iwase were considered from the viewpoint of “civil education”.  First of all, Iwase found the teaching material which was responsible for the civic education in the subject of the SYUSHIN education, and it was not only teaching the virtue as moral education, but trying to enhance the civic education based on it.  Second, Iwase emphasized political, economic, and social content of civil education, and at the elementary education stage, he thought it was important for each subject to work together to give public training to children.  Third, Iwase proposed a curriculum for civil education based on SYUSHIN education, and tried to develop it step by step, with a view to the period from the fourth grade of the training course to the third grade of the higher education department.  In the future, it is a problem to consider the relation between social studies and civil education theory after the Second World War compared with other civic education theory in the early Showa Era.

 In many cases, what has been perceived as “Evaluation” is basically a “Individuals” regardless of whether it is for rating purposes or for improvement purposes, and there is a common idea in how to judge and form the ability in a way that suits the purpose.  However, judging from the above trend of rethinking the evaluation concept, the evaluation is not limited to the judgment of the learner’s ability by the teacher.  In response to this trend, this paper discusses the potential of evaluation as an educational tool, and attempts to reexamine the concept of evaluation. 1) Evaluation can be measured in terms of building relationships among communities of practice. 2) The construction of the intersubjectivity by the dialogue between parties on the case and the narrative in which agreement can be made to produce the evaluation. 3) We will discuss that such evaluation is based on the idea that the act of “appraise” and the existence of a place for doing so itself have an emergent nature of creating new learning and connections.  As a concrete example, since the subject of the study is “foreigner” the case of Japanese language education is one in which the guarantee of individual learning and development is inseparable from the establishment of social relationships and participation in communities.  From this example, we will look specifically at how the aforementioned “Storytelling of Community practice” creates the “Evaluation” aspect and what value is found there.