1st Edition
Team Teachers in Japan Beliefs, Identities, and Emotions
This book provides insights into the professional and personal lives of local language teachers and foreign language teachers who conduct team-taught lessons together. It does this by using the Japanese context as an illustrative example. It re-explores in this context the professional experiences and personal positionings of Japanese teachers of English (JTEs) and foreign assistant language teachers (ALTs), as well as their team-teaching practices in Japan.
This edited book is innovative in that 14 original empirical studies offer a comprehensive overview of the day-to-day professional experiences and realities of these team teachers in Japan, with its focus on their cognitive, ideological, and affective components. This is a multifaceted exploration into team teachers in their gestalt—who they are to themselves and in relation to their students, colleagues, community members, and crucially to their teaching partners.
This book, therefore, offers several empirical and practical applications for future endeavors involving team teachers and those who engage with them—including their key stakeholders, such as researchers on them, their teacher educators, local boards of education, governments, and language learners from around the world.
1. Introduction Part I Power Balance and Lived Experiences 2. Native vs. Non-Native and Novice vs. Expert: Revisiting Power Inequality in Team Teaching 3. From JTE to Team-Teaching Researcher: Autoethnographic Reflections 4. An Autoethnography of a Long-Term ALT: Living with the Enabling and Disabling Effects of Native-Speakerism 5. From Housewives to ALTs: The "Reconfiguration" of Identity of Filipino Women Migrants in Japan Part II Teacher Perceptions, Selfhood, and Feelings 6. "JTEs can Learn from ALTs": JTEs’ Beliefs about Team Teaching and How ALTs Influence JTEs’ Sense of Teacher Identity 7. Recognized Identities of ALTs: Looking through the Lens of JTEs 8. Exploring the Role of Emotion in ALTs’ Identity Construction: An Ecological Perspective 9. Correcting Different Errors with Different Identity-Bound Expertise: Successful Practices for Team Teaching Part III Teacher Learning and Development 10. Teacher Learning for ALTs: Landscapes of Team Teacher Practice and Issue of Participation in Communities of Practice 11. Collaborative Professional Development in Language Teaching: Narratives from JTEs and ALTs 12. Negotiating the Expert/Novice Positions in Language Teacher Professional Development Part IV Team Teachers in Elementary Schools 13. Developing HRTs’ Confidence toward Team Teaching 14. Straight Talk about English from Primary School Homeroom Teachers 15. Elementary Senka/Specialized English Teachers (SETs): Finding a Place among the HRTs and ALTs 16. Conclusion
Biography
Takaaki Hiratsuka is Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Ryukoku Univeristy in Kyoto, Japan.
"This book offers a stunning collection of research, reflections, and recommendations to do with team teaching in the Japanese context. Carefully curated by Hiratsuka, the original studies focus on the inner worlds of the teachers’ relationships as well as their beliefs, emotions and identities in their places of work. They are informative and interesting, all with the potential to inspire a growth mindset for teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. These are real stories of lived experiences, and although they may unfold in Japan, they are of global significance."
Gary Barkhuizen, Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand
"This fascinating book provides valuable insights into the professional and personal lives of teachers’ team teaching in Japan. This focus allows empirical detail of experiences, beliefs, identity, and positioning in team-teaching practices in Japan, as well as cognitive, ideological, and affective perspectives. This important contribution also offers a roadmap for future team-teaching endeavors."
Steve Mann, Professor, University of Warwick, UK
"This book brings together practitioners of team teaching in English classrooms in Japan to critically explore how foreign assistant language teachers and Japanese language teachers perceive, reflect on, and practice team teaching. The 14 chapters reporting empirical studies included in this book provide a vivid account of how team teaching is practised in Japan. This book will be of real benefit to researchers and teachers involved not just in English language teaching in Japan but also worldwide."
Natsuko Shintani, Professor, Kansai University, Japan
