Teacher Training at the Joetsu University of Education

<Working to Restructure the Discipline of Teacher Training>

Since the 2004 establishment of the national university corporation system in Japan, the country’s national universities have carried out their operations based on medium-term goals and medium-term plans that cover six-year periods. At present, 2026 marks year five of the fourth of these periods.

In this fourth period, we are building on our past efforts to restructure teacher training into a discipline all its own, through systematic, organized research into the philosophy, content, and methods of teacher education. A portion of our results have already been published, in Kyoin Yoseigaku o Kangaeru (“Considerations on the Discipline of Teacher Training,” Kazama Shobo, 2025). A second installment is in the works, to be released by March 2027 under the title Kyoin Yoseigaku o Tsukuru (“Creating the Discipline of Teacher Training,” Kazama Shobo). We plan on publishing a third installment, as well.

In Japan, it is sometimes said that education is a century-long major national project. Quality education and school systems are crucial to civilization, and even the ongoing survival of humanity itself; training the teachers who provide this education is a foundational task. For teacher training, Japan operates with the key premise of an “open system,” under which teachers can be licensed after acquiring the necessary credits at any college or university. As a result, students need not study at an explicitly specialized college of education to receive a teaching license, so long as their college or university has established a government-accredited teacher training course. That being said, we disagree that it is enough for someone to simply earn sufficient credits. Our goal is to train teachers who take an interest in, and persistently and proactively engage with, various questions and challenges on the topic of education: what qualities and skills are desirable for a teacher to have? How does subject-specific material correlate to children’s stages of development? What kind of relationship should there be between the individual and the group? To this end, through the discipline of teacher training, we seek to reach the ideal form that teacher training should take.

<The Joetsu University of Education and the Joetsu Region>

We are located in Joetsu City, Niigata Prefecture. Many of our students come from Niigata and the neighboring prefectures, but in spite of our small size, in some years we have had applicants from as far away as Hokkaido or Okinawa. For our undergraduate and graduate-level teaching practicums, we primarily work with schools in Joetsu City and other nearby cities, rather than the student’s own alma mater as most universities do. Doing things this way ensures students have access to guidance from their academic advisors, as well as staff from the Support Office for School Practice Training and Volunteer Activities, even during their practicums. Students doing their practicums can also make use of the university’s library, which features textbooks and supplementary reading materials on all subjects from various publishers, as well as a selection of other education-related materials.

While the Joetsu region is home to only two institutes of higher learning — ourselves and the Niigata College of Nursing — the Joetsu University of Education’s library is open for use by the general public, making our university, in a sense, a cultural center for the community. Our graduates can be found all throughout Japan, but we remain deeply connected to our region.