Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program

by David L. McConnell

  The one thing that caused Karen concern early on was the lack of privacy. Shortly into her stay, she complained, "Last week I went into the city with another ALT, and one of the students saw us and must've told one of the teachers at my visit school. She asked me if I was with my boyfriend. What I do in private is none of their business. It's like, if I cough in the teacher's room, everyone knows it." Karen's interpretation of this treatment was that she was singled out because she was a foreigner, and she began warning teachers and students against using the label "gaijin." Yet Karen also fairly forcefully espoused respect for all cultures. "I think if we can realize that at heart we are all the same, no matter where we come from or what race we are, then we will have taken a great step towards true understanding," she once told me. Though perhaps somewhat naive, this view did lead her to downplay what she saw as negative in Japanese culture and accentuate the positive. She began studying the Japanese language and was a regular participant in the evening Japanese classes taught by Sato-sensei and Tanabe-san. She enjoyed experimenting with all kinds of Japanese foods, and she took calligraphy classes for a good part of her stay. She used her vacation time to visit famous historical spots in Japan (and even Korea), and on her return she wrote summaries for her English classes of her impressions of such places as the Hiroshima Peace Park. In many ways, then, Karen epitomized the type of young person national-level officials envisioned as an ideal JET participant.

  Integration into School Routines

  Japanese schools have been praised for what they accomplish not only academically but socially. At the heart of every high school in Japan is a simple set of activities, all supervised by faculty: classes, special events, and after-school programs. Like most Japanese schools Nishikawa was organized with the teachers' room as its hub, a central station from which teachers ventured out to the classrooms for their specific lessons. Indeed, the overall architecture had been designed with student guidance in mind. The school looked like a hollowed-out, three-story cube with a garden in the middle, but the teacher's room was perched right by the window on the second floor, affording an unobstructed view of hallways throughout the school. Desks in the teachers' room, too, were arranged to facilitate student guidance and school management; the homeroom teachers of each grade all sat in their own clusters and in another grouping sat teachers who had positions in the "school affairs" division (gy(5mubu). Nishikawa also had a half dozen part-time teachers who shared several desks at the end of one cluster, and it was here that Karen sat. Her desk placement thus carried both a symbolic and pragmatic value: placing her with the part-time teachers symbolized her marginality in terms of the overall administration of the school, but it also ensured that none of the Japanese staff would have to shoulder the burden of sitting by Karen and speaking English to her regularly.

  While the atmosphere in the teachers' room varies tremendously from school to school, Nishikawa's large size, academic prestige, and leaders dedicated to protocol made for a very formal and businesslike place.' Students here, unlike in many junior high schools, rarely entered the teachers' room, and any conversation among faculty occurred in full view of others-most particularly that of the stern vice-principal, whose desk, tucked in a corner, overlooked the entire room. The lack of privacy made the JTLs rather self-conscious about speaking English with Karen. In part, they were worried about being misunderstood or, conversely, not understanding what Karen said. But they also feared being poked fun at, on the one hand, or being accused of showing off their English, on the other. Even Uedasensei admitted, "I'm careful not to speak too much English when other teachers are around, but if it's just the two of us I enjoy speaking English a lot." JTLs rationalized their reluctance in other ways as well. Akamatsu- sensei confessed one of the reasons it was so hard to approach Karen was the fear that they would have nothing to talk about (wadai ga tsukunai): "We always worry about that when talking with foreigners." Kawakamisensei told me that Karen became so engrossed in preparing class materials at her desk that the other teachers worried they would be bothering her if they interrupted.

  Karen was largely unaware of this behind-the-scenes hand-wringing, however; and with twelve English teachers on the staff, usually enough people mustered up the courage to speak with her to keep her from ever feeling ostracized. In addition, a mathematics teacher who spoke English better than most JTLs had absolutely no compunctions about engaging her in conversation. But Karen did chafe a bit under what she perceived as the oppressive atmosphere of the teachers' room, and for this reason she eagerly anticipated Wednesday afternoon faculty meetings, which emptied it out. "I love Wednesday afternoons," Karen admitted, "because I can do anything I want."

  Nevertheless, from the outset Hayano-sensei and Ueda-sensei were concerned about Karen's emotional well-being. "To be honest," Hayanosensei told me, "we worry a lot about Karen because she's a single woman." Ueda-sensei, too, confessed that he worried that when everyone else in the teachers' room was talking, Karen must be lonely. They had observed that while Karen was extremely sincere and likable, she was not particularly outgoing and would rarely initiate conversation with students or teachers. At one point Hayano-sensei even approached me to see whether I thought Karen was depressed. Though I replied negatively, it was only a short while later that he asked all teachers to make an effort to talk with Karen as much as possible. In addition, Ueda-sensei began briefing Karen each day on what was said at the morning meeting.

  The thorniest issue to resolve was Karen's team-teaching schedule, and understanding how it played out at Nishikawa requires a knowledge not only of the distinct personalities among the JTLs (and how these individuals related to one another) but also of the place of English classes within the larger organizational and curricular structure of the school. Ability grouping is usually said to be anathema to the strictly egalitarian mind-set of Japanese educators; although this characterization holds for public schools at the elementary and lower secondary level, exam-oriented high schools such as Nishikawa have begun experimenting with tracking. At Nishikawa each grade comprised eleven classes (with approximately forty students per class), and the classes were divided into three groups with slightly different curricula. In each grade, the "third stream" (sanrui) contained one class of students concentrating in physical education; the "second stream" (nirui) held three advanced classes of students concentrating in either the natural sciences or the humanities; and the "first stream" (ichirui), for the average students, numbered seven classes.

  This complex structure seemed to leave little room for team teaching. A memo distributed to all English faculty on 1 September outlined the plan of action for the first month of Karen's visit in great and revealing detail. First, it was assumed from the outset that Karen would not visit the same class more than once a week even though students were taught English class three times a week, as mandated by the Ministry of Education. Second, twelfth-grade students rarely benefited from team teaching. With university entrance exams looming on the horizon, the English faculty as a whole decided that these classes would be off-limits except for "irregular visits." This meant that Miyatani-sensei and Murakawa-sensei, veteran teachers in their fifties who held primary responsibility for preparing the twelfth graders for the exams, almost never team-taught with Karen. They had limited contact to get the "native speaker's point of view" on particularly tricky grammar points that cropped up on the "practice exams" (mogi shiken) every now and then. Finally, only six classes were scheduled for weekly sessions with Karen. Most Nishikawa students experienced team teaching only as a one-shot deal; moreover, the team-teaching load fell disproportionately on five JTLs.

  The first decision of the English faculty, made by consensus, was to target the tenth- and eleventh-grade advanced classes. Ueda-sensei explained: "We were quite worried that, being British, Karen had a level of English that would be hard for our students to understand, so we decided to put her with our best students on a regular basis." In principle, the four JTLs who taught the advanced studen
ts were thus bound to team-teach with Karen. In practice, however, only three did so-and only Ueda-sensei did so with enthusiasm. The fourth, Omori-sensei, had so little interest in team teaching that he got himself exempted from the policy by pointing to an informal survey he had conducted: there was widespread student sentiment, he explained, that devoting one class a week to conversational English would detract from their exam performance.

  The JTLs with whom Karen taught once a week were Kira-sensei, a young female JTL who had just returned from a summer trip to the United States; Kamada-sensei, a young male JTL who was interested in experimenting with team teaching; and Ueda-sensei, whose elective class in conversational English was directed at students who were concentrating in language and literature. This optional class, made up mainly of female students who hoped to study at one of the "foreign language" universities nearby, was held in the school's language laboratory. Smaller than most classes, it became one of Karen's favorites because in it she could use creative lesson plans. The remainder of the JTLs were asked to sign up for one of the regular or irregular visits from the ALT so as to experience team teaching at least once during the semester, and all but two complied.

  Over the course of the year, then, Karen team-taught with thirteen different teachers, and she quickly discovered that they took radically different approaches to her role in the classroom. Ueda-sensei's classes were consistently the most cooperative, in both the planning and the teaching stages. But the classes Karen really threw her heart into were those she taught with Ikuno-sensei, who had been transferred to Nishikawa the same year that she arrived. Ikuno-sensei had a reputation among the other English faculty as being extremely antisocial. A staunch union supporter, he was critical of the school-the stifling atmosphere in the teachers' room, the proliferation of rules and regulations, and the overly serious focus on exams. He refused to use the official form sent by the board of education for the lesson plans used in team teaching, preferring instead to type out his own lengthy plans as well as a personal evaluation of each class. For this class Karen even made a mailbox, which she placed on her desk. She had Ikuno-sensei's students write letters to her, and then she wrote replies.

  Karen was particularly enthusiastic about the political message embedded in many of these classes. For instance, the two addressed world hunger in one lesson by playing the hit song "We Are the World" and asking students, working in small groups, to translate it. Then she and the JTL had the students write essays on poverty, which they sent off to a development agency. Ikuno-sensei even spent a whole period telling students about differences between "developed" and "developing" countries, though he admitted that the principal did not know about this. So excited was Karen to discover a teacher who tried to help students think critically that she began to spend as much time preparing for Ikuno-sensei's classes as all the others combined.

  I was completely surprised, therefore, when I discovered that Ikunosensei did not volunteer to team-teach; in fact, he was far from satisfied with the team-teaching arrangement:

  I've had a hard time with her British accent and her being female. Ideally, I should be able to tell her, "'Here's how I want you to interact with students, I want you to do this ... ," but I can't bring myself to tell her. There must be a better way to do it. It seems like she's always a guest (itsu made mo okyakusan). Until today I planned everything. But actually I want her to direct the class more. That's my self-evaluation (hansei). She should teach more so that students can hear her English. I just don't have time for all this preparation. Before class is the hardest. I get this sinking feeling in my stomach and keep thinking to myself, "There must be a good idea for this class," but no good ideas ever come up. I want her to do interesting things, but not games-even songs are better than games.

  Yet in spite of these reservations, he continued to prepare diligently for his classes with Karen, in part because of his poor relations with other teachers. The following year he asked to be transferred to another school.

  Several teachers tended to forgo the textbook when team teaching with Karen. One was a part-time teacher, Tsuda-sensei, who volunteered to do several one-shot classes: "I decided I wanted to give it a try. The risk is high and it's more work, but I'd never done it before so I wanted to try it. The first few times we didn't use the text. The students have the mind-set that team-taught classes are fun because we don't use the textbook. I think the best part of team teaching is that it motivates students to take an interest in English. We can do exam preparation apart from team teaching. So to me, it's difficult to use the textbook for team teaching." Turning the activities over to Karen, however, had its pitfalls. In one class I observed, Karen had planned to show three pictures of pollution and ask students to write what they saw. But when they balked at writing an open-ended response, Tsuda-sensei immediately switched gears and asked Karen to use "yes-no" questions. As Karen walked by me in the back of the class she whispered, "Oh, Jesus Christ, this is not what we discussed at all. We had planned to let them use their brains a little." Afterward Tsuda-sensei confessed that he was depressed by the way class went. In addition to not being able to please Karen, he had been embarrassed when she had asked him a question that he had not understood. His response ("What?" [Eh?]) had sent students into peals of laughter. He consoled himself with the knowledge that "if students think, 'Even with that English they're communicating,' then I think I've been successful."

  Most teachers at Nishikawa stayed fairly close to the textbook. According to Karen, Sasaki-sensei was "the worst." He always asked her to do conversation practice for the first ten minutes of class and then turned to grammar explanation, pattern practice, and new vocabulary words for the remainder of the period. One day he left a note on her desk in the teacher's room before she got there, explaining that he had things to do in class until 9:20 A.M.; Karen should come only for the last twenty minutes and do a game or whatever she wanted. The following week he canceled the teamtaught class entirely, saying he needed to prepare students for the exam. Karen complained, "Sasaki-sensei always wants to do it separately. There's no team teaching with him."

  Karen's reaction to being treated like a tape recorder was to concentrate on those team-taught classes in which she was given some leeway. She began to work very hard preparing materials for her "good" classes, and sometimes she would spend hours drawing pictures or composing questions. Although ideally team teaching is a sharing of responsibility for the class, Karen was not involved in students' English study beyond her guest appearances. For example, testing was central to life at Nishikawa, and during end-of-term exams her classes were often canceled; she was rarely involved in making out tests or grading assignments. For the most part, Karen accepted this role without complaint.

  On the whole, the students themselves were thrilled by the ALT's presence. One informal survey done by Kawakami-sensei showed that 9o percent of the students were enthusiastic about Karen's team-taught classes. Karen, too, was able to find some satisfaction in relationships established with students in the advanced classes as well as with a handful of the twelfth-grade girls who were taking an elective class in conversational English. The JTLs, however, by and large viewed team teaching as the bane of their existence. They struggled to find a comfortable teaching mode with Karen, and at an evaluation meeting after the first year, they unanimously agreed that team teaching was "stuck in a rut" (mannerika). Even Uedasensei admitted to some misgivings after a homeroom teacher in the eleventh-grade advanced track told him that none of his students achieved outstanding scores in English in the end-of-term exams. Ueda-sensei reflected, "He didn't say it was because of team teaching but I think it was implied in his comments, and I thought about stopping team teaching and just doing exam preparation. In the long term, though, I think team teaching is best so I've decided not to give it up."

  Extracurricular Activities

  The extracurricular activities and special events in Japan's secondary schools are as demanding as their better-publicized academics. K
aren initially expressed interest in joining an after-school club, but her attempt to participate in track and field left her frustrated. With her limited Japanese skills, she felt uncomfortable in the relatively unstructured setting of club practices; and she discovered that high school age students, while more mature than junior high students, were also more inhibited. She quickly tired of their shy but polite demeanor toward her and informed Ueda-sensei that she would rather participate in the ESS (English Speaking Society) club.

  Unfortunately, while sports clubs were very popular at Nishikawa, the culture clubs were not, in part because they were "required clubs" (hisshukurabu). The ESS was made up almost exclusively of girls (fiftyfive), not an insignificant number of whom, according to Kawakami-sensei (the faculty sponsor), had chosen it as a last resort. Karen did coordinate one cooking lesson (scones, English pancakes, and Swiss rolls), but the bulk of the sessions involved showing a movie or doing some kind of listening exercise. After going several times and feeling very awkward, she confessed, "I hate it when people join the ESS club who don't want to speak English. At 4:0o in the afternoon, I don't want to listen to Japanese." At one ESS meeting I attended, Kawakami-sensei was orchestrating a listening exercise followed by a quiz. She spoke in Japanese exclusively and interpreted every word that Karen said. "This is killing, isn't it?" she whispered to me. "A classic tape-recorder lesson."