Education and research in the Pedagogy Program aims to reveal the human educational/learning activities conducted in various social locations by using human growth and development throughout one’s life and diverse everyday practices as the basic guiding perspectives, and investigate a form of rational but humanly education and learning institutions. Today’s complex social systems and increasingly dynamic everyday life has made it difficult to address this problem within the traditional system or with those with rigid ideas on humans, demanding interdisciplinary approaches that take into consideration the diverse aspects of humans. Contemporary pedagogy thus needs to actively engage with different academic disciplines and present the diverse knowledge that such interactions would generate by synthesizing and systematically organizing it from the perspective of a new way of human living or a new way of the society.
The Course in Clinical Inquiries in Education, along with the Course in Social Inquiries in Education, constitutes the Pedagogy Program and undertakes theoretical, experimental, clinical, and practical research that generally observes the growth and development of each individual. There are five research tracks in the course: Anthropology of Education, Human Transformation Study, Educational Technology, Educational Psychology, and Clinical Psychology . Our education and research activities are not constrained by rigid frameworks and focus on unique research themes that are related to one another such as the historical anthropological examination of education knowledge, development of education and learning systems using learning environment designs and cutting-edge information technology, basic and developmental research on thoughts and communication, empirical research of individuals’ false steps and recovery in their emotional and social development, and empirical research on the manifestation of various psychological problems and the process overcoming such problems.
Japan today is characterized by the aging society with fewer children, and the acceleration of the globalization of life and informatization. Questions of education/learning concerning human growth and development are much broader than before. The goal of this course is to develop individuals who have the capacity to engage in these contemporary issues both theoretically and empirically from human scientific perspectives.