Gaining International Perspectives through Undergraduate Education: Comparative Case Analysis focusing on International Liberal Arts Provision
- Akiyoshi Yonezawa, Tohoku University
- Sae Shimauchi, Tokyo Metropolitan University, International Center
- James Robson, University of Oxford
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Speakers: Akiyoshi Yonezawa, Sae Shimauchi
Chair: James Robson
In this webinar, we first overview the historical context of the humanities and liberal arts in East Asia, focusing on the bottlenecks in the humanities and social sciences in Japan. Then, we examine the practices of international undergraduate education by focusing on the liberal arts in five, mostly medium-sized, countries with quite different geopolitical contexts: the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan. We analyze whether the reforms of undergraduate education in these countries are moving in the direction of global convergence or divergence based on the respective contexts of each country’s society and higher education system. We explore whether changes are based on intrinsic values and directions inherent to universities and higher education arising from their education and research activities, or extrinsic values and directions demanded by society and industry, such as human resource development and industrial innovation. Our findings show that no single direction can be argued to be a “global trend.” This implies that each country and university should carefully examine and identify the global landscape and the most relevant direction to pursue in terms of university education.
About the CGHE webinar series on ‘Do the Arts and Humanities have a Place in Higher Education? Fresh lenses on the debates’
The economic purposes of higher education dominate policy and public discourse in HE systems around the world with graduate labour market outcomes, graduate salaries, and the skills needs of employers increasingly used as markers of educational quality and mechanisms of institutional regulation. Arts and Humanities subjects tend to be associated with relatively modest labour market returns compared to STEM and medical sciences subjects and are often criticised for failing to provide employers with the skills required by a rapidly digitising economy. At the same time, researchers in Arts and Humanities subjects often struggle to show clear impact from their work in a regulatory and funding context that links research value with impact, industrial linkages, and innovation. As such, the Arts and Humanities face criticism, regulatory pressures, and reduced funding. The Arts and Humanities are consequently often described as being in a state of ‘crisis’ and sympathetic commentators, advocates, and researchers regularly attempt to justify the importance of these subjects in both economic and intrinsic terms.
However, the debates over the social, political, and economic value of the Arts and Humanities have been taking place in various forms for more than a century. In fact, the Arts and Humanities have arguably been in a near constant state of crisis since at least 1959, when C. P. Snow wrote his famous essay on ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. Despite ongoing crises, some expansions and contractions, and some tinkering at disciplinary boundaries, the Arts and Humanities have proved remarkably robust and resilient. Yet critiques and existential justifications for Arts and Humanities subjects remain a regular feature of the higher education landscape with very little meaningful dialogue taking place between either side and no realistic move towards resolution in the debate at either policy, public or academic levels. A new way of framing the discussion of the place of the Arts and Humanities in higher education is clearly required. Therefore, in this seminar series we aim to shift the discourse and reframe the discussion by bringing together different perspectives to examine the place of the Arts and Humanities in relation to society, politics and the economy through the lenses of individual students, academics and researchers, institutional governance, national policy, and global discourse.
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Dr. Akiyoshi Yonezawa is Professor and Vice-Director, International Strategy Office, Tohoku University, Japan. With a background in sociology, he mainly conducts research on comparative higher education policy – especially focusing on world-class universities, internationalization, and public-private relationships in higher education. He established his expertise through working experience at Nagoya University, OECD, and the University of Tokyo, etc. He is an editorial board member of Higher Education Quarterly, and an advisory board member for Higher Education, and International Higher Education. He is a board member of Japan Association for Higher Education Research, Japan Comparative Education Society, Japan Society of Educational Sociology.
Dr. Sae Shimauchi is an Associate Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University, International Center. She completed her Ph.D. at Waseda University and previously worked as an Assistant Professor at The Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University. Her research interests lie in the area of internationalization of higher education, sociolinguistics, international studies and global sociology, ranging from theory to practices. Her recent work includes Paradigm Shift on International Student Mobility in East Asia (Toshindo 2016), “The Influence of Internationalization Policy on Master’s Education in Japan: A Comparison of “Super Global” and Mass-Market Universities” ‘(Higher Education Policy 33, 689–709, 2021).
James Robson is Co-Director of Oxford University’s Centre for Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance (SKOPE), Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, and leads Oxford’s MSc in HE. He is a CGHE co-investigator on Project 3, ‘Research on Research: the research function and mission of higher education’.
