Keita Takayama
Biographic Data
| ID | 758770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Keita Takayama |
| GIVEN NAMES | Keita |
| FAMILY NAME | Takayama |
| SIGNATURE | TAKAYAMA K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of New England |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9888-0047 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 396 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Challenging teacher education research
At the start of our tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we published a statement in which we put eight challenges to the field of teacher education research (Biesta e
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
An invitation to theorise East Asian pedagogy: Bodymind, dark consciousness, kata, and self-cultivation
Building on the theoretical work initiated by Komatsu and Rappleye (Comparative Education Review 61:269–297, 2017), this paper turns to the East Asian and Japanese theories of bodymind (body-mind unity) and learning as a possible theoretical resource for a new appraisal of East Asian pedagogy. To this end, the paper will first delve into the East Asian and Japanese theories of bodymind and learning, drawing on scholarship of comparative philosoph…
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific journal of teacher education
Challenging Teacher Education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
Is teacher efficacy a myth
Unlearning Cartesian consciousness: On the source of Anglo-American prejudice towards East Asian education
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the asia-pacific journal of teacher education
At the start of our tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we published a position paper in which we formulated eight challenges for the field of teacher education and t
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific journal of teacher education
At the start of our tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we published a position paper in which we formulated eight challenges for the field of teacher education and t
Ignoring reality? Doubling education’s exigencies
In this brief editorial, we take some inspiration from Marina Garcés’s book New Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy for a Common World (2024) and two things that she points out as being endemic to th
Publish and perish: Academic journal publishing at a crossroad
Academic journal publishing relies heavily on peer review. This is certainly the case with our journal, too. The Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE) cannot sustain itself without the
Amplify as a discourse and what it might mean for teacher education research
You may have noticed that the word “amplify” is currently everywhere. It is writ large in advertising for the generative AI programme Claude (n.d.): “your ideas, amplified.” It is in an article in
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
At the start of our tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we published a position paper in which we formulated eight challenges for the field of teacher education and t
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
At the start of our tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we published a position paper in which we formulated eight challenges for the field of teacher education and t
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
At the start of our tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we published a position paper in which we formulated eight challenges for the field of teacher education and t
Educational sense-taking: Holding space for education amidst new authoritarianisms
As the end of 2024 rolls into view, we watch worriedly the rise of Trumpist-national-populism in the U.S.A., but not just there. Along with this rise, the grounds on which education rests as an act
How to say in English what you cannot say in English? Dilemmas of ‘global’ scholarship and small steps forward
It is interesting to observe that when we say that English has more or less become the “lingua franca” of contemporary academic scholarship and publishing, we use a Latin phrase which, itself, refe
International Large-Scale Assessments (Ilsas): What have they done for education
For over two centuries, education scholars and policy communities have sought to measure and compare education. However, it is only in recent decades that comparative measurements of learning began rising to prominence above all other educational data. Comparative learning measures are now so established that gathering comparative learning data has become an educational purpose in itself. This Commentary Paper provides a timely critical reflectio…
Why teacher education? Why not education? The eternal, and infernal, project to form the teacher subject
This editorial marks the final issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE) for 2024 – Issue 5 (Volume 52). Following a scan of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) web
Engaging with ‘China’: A dialogue among APJTE editors
Since we started assuming the role of editors for APJTE in 2020, China has been by far the top source of manuscripts for our journal. And yet, very few papers from China have found themselves print
School can’t? Thinking about refusal in education
Morally the only reliable people when the chips are down are those who say “I can’t” (Arendt, 2003)... school refusal is a normal avoidance reaction to an unpleasant, unsatisfying, or even hostile en
Challenging teacher education: A series of invited papers for the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
At the start of our tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we published a position paper in which we formulated eight challenges for the field of teacher education and t
Researching Global Education Policy: Diverse Approaches to Policy Movement
Contradictory rationales behind national education export: Tracing the policy formation processes of EDU-Port Japan
An invitation to an interdependent mode of academic engagement in comparative and global education studies: A response to Edward Vickers’ criticism
Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education
This article, which serves to introduce the special issue on "Contesting Coloniality: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education," brings to the fore the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). We begin by showing how colonial logics underpin the scholarship of one of the field's founding figures, Isaac L. Kandel. These l…
The politics of international league tables: Pisa in Japan’s achievement crisis debate
Using the political-economic analysis of globalisation and education as well as a culturalist approach to education policy borrowing, the paper analyses the role of local actors, specifically, national newspapers and the Ministry of Education, in mediating the potentially homogenising curricular policy pressure of globalisation exerted through the PISA league tables. Using the recent Japanese education policy debate as a case study, the author de…
Rethinking the pattern of external policy referencing: Media discourses over the ‘Asian Tigers’’ Pisa success in Australia, Germany and South Korea
The article compares how the success of the ‘Asian Tiger’ countries in PISA, especially PISA 2009, was depicted in the media discussion in Australia, Germany and South Korea. It argues that even in the times of today's ‘globalised education policy field’, local factors are important in determining whether or not a country becomes a reference society for educational reform. The article aims to uncover some of these factors, identifying the globall…
Policy mobilities and methodology: A proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies
The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the moveme…
Beyond Comforting Histories: The Colonial/Imperial Entanglements of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, and Isaac L. Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University
This article critically assesses the works of Paul Monroe, Isaac L. Kandel, and the International Institute at the Teachers College, Columbia University, in the early twentieth century. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of contrapuntal reading, it presents a different account of their legacies that foregrounds the colonial and imperial realities of the time as constitutively significant to the early formation of the field and the comparative educat…
A comparativist’s predicaments of writing about ‘other’ education: A self-reflective, critical review of studies of Japanese education
This self-reflexive essay teases out the predicaments that I have encountered through my past publishing experience, while situating them in a critical review of the existing English-language studies of Japanese education. Drawing on postcolonial theoretical insights and recent critical sociology of academic knowledge production, I use my personal experience as a starting point to identify the particular discursive structure of comparative educat…
The cultural politics of borrowing: Japan, Britain, and the narrative of educational crisis
In the recent debate over education reform, Japanese conservative politicians and intellectuals have selectively appropriated a particular crisis‐and‐success narrative of British education reform to de‐territorialize contentious policy changes. They assert that Britain achieved successful education reform by transforming the very same teaching practices and legal framework that currently afflict Japanese education. In so doing, the Japanese conse…
Deploying the post-colonial predicaments of researching on/with 'Asia' in education: A Standpoint From a Rich Peripheral Country
Against the current infatuation with Asia in Australian education, this article rearticulates the notion of ‘Asia literacy’ to explore new ways of researching on/with/through Asia. Drawing on the post-colonial critique of Western social science knowledge, I first demonstrate the problematic nature of Australian knowledge production on and with Asia in social science and education. And yet, I also highlight the contribution that Australian scholar…
How to mess with Pisa: Learning from Japanese kokugo curriculum experts
To remove cultural bias is critical for the legitimacy of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as an internationally reliable academic assessment. Since its inception, PISA has made extensive effort to address this issue by putting in place a range of methodological and procedural measures to ensure its test fairness. This study attempts to disrupt the clean and reassuring accounts of PISA's technical solutions to cultural bias a…
An invitation to an interdependent mode of academic engagement in comparative and global education studies: A response to Edward Vickers’ criticism
Provincialising the world culture theory debate: Critical insights from a margin
Neo-institutionalist theory of global ‘isomorphism’, or so-called World Culture Theory (WCT), has been much debated in comparative education. One notable feature of the debate is that the vast majority of its participants belong to a handful of closely knit comparative education communities. Ironically enough then, a debate that fundamentally concerns the globalisation of education has hardly been ‘globalised’, with virtually no comparative schol…
Exploring the interweaving of contrary currents: Transnational policy enactment and path-dependent policy implementation in Australia and Japan
This article explores the neo-institutional theory of global policy convergence, or ‘isomorphism’, by comparatively examining one of its most recent manifestations – the global diffusion of national standardised testing – in Australia and Japan. By understanding the particular configurations of national testing as being conditioned by both nations' institutional frameworks and historical legacies of education policy development, this study illumi…
Datafication of schooling in Japan: An epistemic critique through the ‘problem of Japanese education’
Juxtaposed with the emerging body of literature about datafication in schooling, this paper examines the increasing encroachment of data into the Japanese education system, in particular, the use of data associated with standardised academic assessments for governance purposes. In so doing, we use the Japanese ‘case’ to expose the possible limits of the existing English-language scholarship on this phenomenon. By providing a contextualised, descr…
The constitution of East Asia as a counter reference society through Pisa: A postcolonial/de-colonial intervention
This study examines the dismissive characterisation of East Asian PISA success in Australia to extend the emerging conceptual work on policy learning/referencing, reference society, and projection in comparative and international education. By highlighting the constitutive roles of racialisation and colonial difference in the media construction of East Asian education, I expose the limits of the ongoing conceptual work and problematise its exclus…
Pisa, power, and policy: The emergence of global educational governance
Many articles and books related to OECD's education work, including its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), have been published over the last decade and PISA, power, and policy i
Japan’s Ministry of Education “becoming the Right”: Neo‐liberal restructuring and the Ministry’s struggles for political legitimacy
This article first examines the controversial revision of the Fundamental Law of Education (FLE) by situating it in the larger global context of neo‐liberal and neo‐conservative state‐restructuring and education reform. It then focuses on the domestic politics behind what seems to be the global convergence of education policy along neo‐liberal and neo‐conservative lines. Focusing on the political agency of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and trac…
A radical proposal: Evidence-based SDG 4 discussions
An invitation to ‘negative’ comparative education
In this paper, I reflect upon my journey of learning to do comparative education research over the last decade and half. It involves transnational moves from Japan, Canada, US, Australia and back to Japan where I encountered numerous ‘others’. I use my story of a series of relocations as an entry point for theorising what I mean by ‘negative’ comparative education. Drawing on Andrea English and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, I use the term ‘nega…
Towards a new articulation of comparative educations: Cross-culturalising research imaginations
The Japan Comparative Education Society (JCES) was founded in 1965 with its flagship Japanese-language journal Hikakukyoikukenkyu (Comparative Education Research) first published in 1975. The organisation currently has around 1000 members, making it the second largest comparative education society in the world. Though JCES members have long engaged in methodological and theoretical debates, their insights are hardly acknowledged in the English-la…
How to achieve a ‘revolution’: Assembling the subnational, national and global in the formation of a new, ‘scientific’ assessment in Japan
This paper traces the complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in the creation of a new, ‘scientific’ assessment in what we call Prefecture A in Japan. We start with a thick, granular description of the complicated and ongoing narrative of a new policy emergence. This descriptive account serves as a precursor to our application of an Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach, particularly the concepts of assemblage and assembling, while at the…
Absurdity of ‘the UK experience’ as a reflective resource in Kyoto
Untangling the global-distant-local knot: The politics of national academic achievement testing in Japan
This study examines one of the most notable manifestations of Japanese education’s incorporation into the global education restructuring movement: the 2007 reintroduction of national academic achievement testing (zenkoku gakuryoku gakushuu joukyou chousa). In so doing, I aim to untangle the complex intermingling of national and global pressures as the new mode of test-based governance became embedded in the Japanese education policy context. The …
Contradictory rationales behind national education export: Tracing the policy formation processes of EDU-Port Japan
Fast policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism
This paper discusses the theoretical and methodological contributions of 'Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism' by Peck and Theodore (2015, University of Minnesota Press). It does so by situating the book in the ongoing debate on policy borrowing and lending in the field of comparative education, of which I have been a part. Arguably it is the body of literature in education policy studies that relates directly …
Globalizing critical studies of ‘official’ knowledge: Lessons from the Japanese history textbook controversy over ‘comfort women’
This paper discusses the Japanese history textbook controversy over 'comfort women' to tease out insights that help globalize the existing theoretical discussion of politics of school knowledge. I begin by documenting how the domestic struggles over Japanese history textbooks are empowered and disempowered by the regional and international power relations. Using the Japanese case, I first problematize the use of hegemony in critical scholarship w…
Japan’s Ministry of Education “becoming the Right”: Neo‐liberal restructuring and the Ministry’s struggles for political legitimacy
This article first examines the controversial revision of the Fundamental Law of Education (FLE) by situating it in the larger global context of neo‐liberal and neo‐conservative state‐restructuring and education reform. It then focuses on the domestic politics behind what seems to be the global convergence of education policy along neo‐liberal and neo‐conservative lines. Focusing on the political agency of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and trac…
The politics of international league tables: Pisa in Japan’s achievement crisis debate
Using the political-economic analysis of globalisation and education as well as a culturalist approach to education policy borrowing, the paper analyses the role of local actors, specifically, national newspapers and the Ministry of Education, in mediating the potentially homogenising curricular policy pressure of globalisation exerted through the PISA league tables. Using the recent Japanese education policy debate as a case study, the author de…
The cultural politics of borrowing: Japan, Britain, and the narrative of educational crisis
In the recent debate over education reform, Japanese conservative politicians and intellectuals have selectively appropriated a particular crisis‐and‐success narrative of British education reform to de‐territorialize contentious policy changes. They assert that Britain achieved successful education reform by transforming the very same teaching practices and legal framework that currently afflict Japanese education. In so doing, the Japanese conse…
Globalizing critical studies of ‘official’ knowledge: Lessons from the Japanese history textbook controversy over ‘comfort women’
This paper discusses the Japanese history textbook controversy over 'comfort women' to tease out insights that help globalize the existing theoretical discussion of politics of school knowledge. I begin by documenting how the domestic struggles over Japanese history textbooks are empowered and disempowered by the regional and international power relations. Using the Japanese case, I first problematize the use of hegemony in critical scholarship w…
Politics of Externalization in Reflexive Times: Reinventing Japanese Education Reform Discourses through “Finnish Pisa Success”
With the release of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 results in late 2004, Finland became the focus of international admiration. Soon after the study's release, scholars, journalists, and government officials from around the world flocked to the small Nordic nation in search of the "secret" of its educational accomplishment (Asahi News 2002). While Finland enjoyed international acclaim, Japan - the former exemplar of…
Other Japanese educations and Japanese education otherwise
Education in the United States was in a state of "crisis" at the time of the 1983 release of 'A Nation at Risk', the landmark report on the US education reform. This was the time when the rising Japanese economy started threatening the post-war US economic dominance and conservative figures such as Ronald Reagan gained popular support. Subsequent US debates over education reform put Japanese education in the spotlight, driving many American educa…
A comparativist’s predicaments of writing about ‘other’ education: A self-reflective, critical review of studies of Japanese education
This self-reflexive essay teases out the predicaments that I have encountered through my past publishing experience, while situating them in a critical review of the existing English-language studies of Japanese education. Drawing on postcolonial theoretical insights and recent critical sociology of academic knowledge production, I use my personal experience as a starting point to identify the particular discursive structure of comparative educat…
Exploring the interweaving of contrary currents: Transnational policy enactment and path-dependent policy implementation in Australia and Japan
This article explores the neo-institutional theory of global policy convergence, or ‘isomorphism’, by comparatively examining one of its most recent manifestations – the global diffusion of national standardised testing – in Australia and Japan. By understanding the particular configurations of national testing as being conditioned by both nations' institutional frameworks and historical legacies of education policy development, this study illumi…
Pisa, power, and policy: The emergence of global educational governance
Many articles and books related to OECD's education work, including its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), have been published over the last decade and PISA, power, and policy i
Untangling the global-distant-local knot: The politics of national academic achievement testing in Japan
This study examines one of the most notable manifestations of Japanese education’s incorporation into the global education restructuring movement: the 2007 reintroduction of national academic achievement testing (zenkoku gakuryoku gakushuu joukyou chousa). In so doing, I aim to untangle the complex intermingling of national and global pressures as the new mode of test-based governance became embedded in the Japanese education policy context. The …
Provincialising the world culture theory debate: Critical insights from a margin
Neo-institutionalist theory of global ‘isomorphism’, or so-called World Culture Theory (WCT), has been much debated in comparative education. One notable feature of the debate is that the vast majority of its participants belong to a handful of closely knit comparative education communities. Ironically enough then, a debate that fundamentally concerns the globalisation of education has hardly been ‘globalised’, with virtually no comparative schol…
Rethinking the pattern of external policy referencing: Media discourses over the ‘Asian Tigers’’ Pisa success in Australia, Germany and South Korea
The article compares how the success of the ‘Asian Tiger’ countries in PISA, especially PISA 2009, was depicted in the media discussion in Australia, Germany and South Korea. It argues that even in the times of today's ‘globalised education policy field’, local factors are important in determining whether or not a country becomes a reference society for educational reform. The article aims to uncover some of these factors, identifying the globall…
Asia as method in education: A defiant research imagination
Kuan-Hsing Chen, renowned for his scholarship in cultural studies, is a provocative scholar and activist; as those of us who were at the 2012 Annual Conference for the Australian Association for Re
Learning from Shanghai: Lessons on achieving educational success
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has now created a new market for education publishing. Similar to Surpass
Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education
This article, which serves to introduce the special issue on "Contesting Coloniality: Rethinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Education," brings to the fore the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). We begin by showing how colonial logics underpin the scholarship of one of the field's founding figures, Isaac L. Kandel. These l…
Deploying the post-colonial predicaments of researching on/with 'Asia' in education: A Standpoint From a Rich Peripheral Country
Against the current infatuation with Asia in Australian education, this article rearticulates the notion of ‘Asia literacy’ to explore new ways of researching on/with/through Asia. Drawing on the post-colonial critique of Western social science knowledge, I first demonstrate the problematic nature of Australian knowledge production on and with Asia in social science and education. And yet, I also highlight the contribution that Australian scholar…
Policy mobilities and methodology: A proposition for inventive methods in education policy studies
The argument of this paper is that new methodologies associated with the emerging field of ‘policy mobilities’ can be applied, and are in fact required, to examine and research the networked and relational, or ‘topological’, nature of globalised education policy, which cuts across the new spaces of policymaking and new modes of global educational governance. In this paper, we examine the methodological issues pertaining to the study of the moveme…
Towards a new articulation of comparative educations: Cross-culturalising research imaginations
The Japan Comparative Education Society (JCES) was founded in 1965 with its flagship Japanese-language journal Hikakukyoikukenkyu (Comparative Education Research) first published in 1975. The organisation currently has around 1000 members, making it the second largest comparative education society in the world. Though JCES members have long engaged in methodological and theoretical debates, their insights are hardly acknowledged in the English-la…
Fast policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism
This paper discusses the theoretical and methodological contributions of 'Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism' by Peck and Theodore (2015, University of Minnesota Press). It does so by situating the book in the ongoing debate on policy borrowing and lending in the field of comparative education, of which I have been a part. Arguably it is the body of literature in education policy studies that relates directly …
The constitution of East Asia as a counter reference society through Pisa: A postcolonial/de-colonial intervention
This study examines the dismissive characterisation of East Asian PISA success in Australia to extend the emerging conceptual work on policy learning/referencing, reference society, and projection in comparative and international education. By highlighting the constitutive roles of racialisation and colonial difference in the media construction of East Asian education, I expose the limits of the ongoing conceptual work and problematise its exclus…
How to mess with Pisa: Learning from Japanese kokugo curriculum experts
To remove cultural bias is critical for the legitimacy of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as an internationally reliable academic assessment. Since its inception, PISA has made extensive effort to address this issue by putting in place a range of methodological and procedural measures to ensure its test fairness. This study attempts to disrupt the clean and reassuring accounts of PISA's technical solutions to cultural bias a…
Beyond Comforting Histories: The Colonial/Imperial Entanglements of the International Institute, Paul Monroe, and Isaac L. Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University
This article critically assesses the works of Paul Monroe, Isaac L. Kandel, and the International Institute at the Teachers College, Columbia University, in the early twentieth century. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of contrapuntal reading, it presents a different account of their legacies that foregrounds the colonial and imperial realities of the time as constitutively significant to the early formation of the field and the comparative educat…
An invitation to ‘negative’ comparative education
In this paper, I reflect upon my journey of learning to do comparative education research over the last decade and half. It involves transnational moves from Japan, Canada, US, Australia and back to Japan where I encountered numerous ‘others’. I use my story of a series of relocations as an entry point for theorising what I mean by ‘negative’ comparative education. Drawing on Andrea English and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, I use the term ‘nega…
Datafication of schooling in Japan: An epistemic critique through the ‘problem of Japanese education’
Juxtaposed with the emerging body of literature about datafication in schooling, this paper examines the increasing encroachment of data into the Japanese education system, in particular, the use of data associated with standardised academic assessments for governance purposes. In so doing, we use the Japanese ‘case’ to expose the possible limits of the existing English-language scholarship on this phenomenon. By providing a contextualised, descr…
Teacher education between principle, politics, and practice: A statement from the new editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education
A case can be made that in many countries for a significant period of time, teacher education provided one of the few opportunities for people in the lower and middle social classes to achieve intellectual and, potentially, social advancement
Sociology (50 works) · Political science (49 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (42 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (41 works) · Law (30 works) · Psychology (29 works) · Mathematics education (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Pedagogy (22 works) · Higher education (20 works)