Trends of Children's Engagement with Housing and Community Environmental Issues in Japan

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments 17(1), 2007 Trends of Children’s Engagement with Housing and Community Environmental Issues in Japan Naka Hirai Aiko Okazaki Housing Research Foundation Tokyo, Japan Citation: Hirai, Naka and Aiko Okazaki (2007). “Trends of Children’s Engagement with Housing and Community Environmental Issues in Japan.” Children, Youth and Environments 17(1): 310-312. Keywords: education, learning, housing, community, machizukuri There has been a growth of new approaches to education in Japan in recent years that gives greater recognition to children as active learners and to hands-on practice (Adams and Kinoshita 2000). The newly introduced “Period for Integrated Study” in the schools has been a particularly important innovation. We recently carried out an analysis of reports that had been collected or published by the Housing Research Foundation1 in order to reveal what has been happening in Japan in relation to “education on housing and the community environment.” We began soliciting papers on this theme in 1999 with the aim of fostering cross-disciplinary debate on the subject. We have also organized presentations and published collected volumes of research.2 Our annual publication, “Collected Papers and Reports: Learning in and through Our Living Environment,” brings together the solicited contributions and represents a unique concentration in Japan of documented research and achievement in the field. Although the majority of our reports are written by university researchers and students and by architecture, town planning, and landscape architecture professionals working in local 1 http://www.jusoken.or.jp/english.htm. 2 The Housing and Environmental Education Committee includes: Chairperson: Dr. Yasuhiro Endo (Professor, Aichi Sangyo University); Members: Dr. Kimiko Kozawa (Professor, Tokyo Gakugei University), Dr. Isami Kinoshita (Professor, Chiba University), Ms. Mariko Machida (Teacher, Elementary School of Tsukuba University), Dr. Masahiro Nasu (Professor, Sophia University), Ms. Yuko Tsutsumi (Assistant Manager and Social Education Officer, Central Citizen's Center, Taihaku Ward, Sendai). We solicit papers through various organizations, including The Architectural Institute of Japan, The Association of Urban Housing Science, The Japan Society of Home Economics, and The City Planning Institute of Japan, as well as through periodical publications and newspapers in the educational and architectural fields. Trends of Children’s Engagement with Housing and Community... 311 government and design offices, many are from persons who are actively working as specialists in local communities. In addition, 15 percent are from educators in elementary, junior high and high schools. Professionals in the fields of architecture and town planning have become involved in education on housing and the community environment in order to build citizenship participation capacities in relation to the built environment. The introduction of the “Period for Integrated Study” into the school curriculum in 20023 presented opportunities to use the local environment as one possible focus of learning. We found from our analysis that there were similar percentages of projects that “tackled the issue through schools, through the community or through Machizukuri” (community development and neighborhood improvement projects). More importantly, we found that the majority of the projects in each of these categories includes specific accounts of practical work undertaken by children through machizukuri workshops. There have recently been some complaints about a lowering of children’s academic ability and demands to reassess the concept of this integrated study period, but the launch in 2005 of the “United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development” seems to have provided an additional stimulus to the growth of community environmental study in the schools. It is useful to critique these new programs from the point of view of the stages of local environmental engagement identified by Hirai and Kozawa (1997): the stage of simply experiencing a place through walking through the town; the stage of acquiring knowledge about a place and deepening it through investigations; and finally the stages of understanding that knowledge and acquiring the ability to evaluate the environment and engage in group discussions or presentations. Most of the projects with children are at the lower levels of engagement, but we found that even some elementary schools are reaching an advanced, participatory, stage of engagement with their children. In one example, a local government administration reviewing fifth grade children’s plans for their new school were sufficiently respectful of the students...