Professor Keita Takayama

Born and raised in the heart of Tokyo, I completed all my primary, secondary and university education in the heart of Tokyo and then went on to undertake postgraduate education in North America (University of British Columbia and University of Wisconsin-Madison). My first academic job at the University of New England (UNE) brought me to Australia for the first time. After teaching at UNE for nearly 12 years, I took up professorship at Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University in Japan. After teaching in Kyoto for 4 and half years, I decided to come back to Australia, now working at UniSA Education Futures. Over the last 25+ years of my teaching career, I have taught primary and secondary students, university students and adults in Australia, Canada, India, Japan and USA.   

While my research topics and themes have constantly evolved over the course of my research career, there ‘appear to be’ three features that are increasingly foregrounded in my work. I’d say ‘there appear to be’ here to signal that I did not have a clearly defined purpose of my scholarship at the onset of my career. It is more accurate and honest to say that these features have emerged through ongoing retrospective self-reflections.

First, I have always been interested in cross-cultural investigations of education, or comparative and international studies of education. I am an education scholar who was born and schooled in Japan and undertook most of the advanced academic training in North America. To put it differently, I have an emplaced experience of growing up and being schooled in Japan, while much of my analytical insights, if not all, are developed outside Japan and informed by the ‘international’ scholarship. This trajectory has strongly shaped what and how I study education. Whether my research concerns educational practices, thoughts, policies, or institutions, whether in Australia, Japan, East Asia, or on transnational organizations, a comparative and international approach has been central part of my research work.

But what I mean by ‘comparative and international approach’ is of a specific kind, and this is the second feature of my work. I have studied Japanese or East Asian education with a particular intent in mind. That is, I am interested in shifting the terms of international discussion about East Asian education. There is an impressive volume of research on East Asian education, but much of it seems to suffer from the following two issues: the view of East Asin education as a place of ‘deficit’ and as a ‘data mine.’ The former refers to the fact that East Asian education has been characterized by its lack of what characterizes ‘good education,’ including individuality, creativity and critical thinking. The trouble is that the notion of ‘good education’ is of a particular kind, underpinned by the liberal-humanistic assumptions about self, nature (humans), knowing, and secularity. This suggests that one cannot truly appreciate East Asian education unless s/he is prepared to let go of the prevailing modern (liberal) premises of education.

The latter (East Asian education as a ‘data mine’) refers to the fact that much of international scholarship on East Asian education treats the region as a place where data are collected: Theories, generated elsewhere, are applied to the region to make sense of the empirical reality. Such studies treat local students, teachers and researchers as ‘informants,’ while failing to engage with the local scholarship and intellectual works produced therein. Recognizing these two tendencies (deficit and data mine) as closely intertwined, I have attempted to position East Asia as a resource with which the internationally accepted assumptions about education can be particularized and peculiarized to broaden the international conversation.

The ‘defamiliarizing’ intent leads to the third feature of my scholarship, which relates to the broader politics of academic knowledge production in education research. Many of my recent writings have been informed by post-colonial and de-colonial theoretical literatures, and I find them useful in interrogating the historical formation of the foundational knowledge in comparative and international education and sociology of education. Postcolonial and decolonial scholars have helped me understand how the liberal-humanistic principles were deeply entangled with the colonial logic of difference in the early 20th century when such educational sub-disciplines were established, and how the same liberal assumptions remain unquestioned today in much of the international scholarly discussion on what counts as ‘good education.’

CIES (Comparative & International Education Society), USA

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy The University of Wisconsin Madison

Work history

After completing PhD in 2007, I commenced my academic career as a Lecturer with the University of New England in Armidale NSW. I stayed there for 11 and half years before relocating back to Japan to accept Professorship at the Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Japan. In August 2023, I came back to Australia to work as a Professor at the UniSA Education Futures.