The Language Teacher
02 - 2001
Limited-Term Appointments and Their Effect on Curriculum Development
Daniel T. Kirk
Prefectural University of Kumamoto
PALE: Professionalism, Administration and Leadership in Education. We are a group of JALT Members who are concerned with professional and employment issues, particularly in the Japanese university system. In recent years, we have been documenting specific cases that will have long-term effects on the treatment of non-Japanese employees. We choose the article by Daniel Kirk because it is a self-contained, albeit longer, essay on why people should care about contract employment with a case study on its specific effects on professionalism
Discriminatory labor practices at the Prefectural University of Kumamoto create an exclusionary environment in which experienced, well-trained EFL teachers are left out of the curriculum development process because they are non-Japanese. The creation of a subclass of teachers who have no avenues for contributing to the curriculum for which they are responsible and who are punished for speaking out has detrimental effects on educational opportunities for the students, teachers, community, and institution itself.
The struggle of English language teachers at the Prefectural University of Kumamoto (PUK) has been to preserve livelihoods as well as to improve the learning environment. The teachers continue struggling to bring legitimacy to themselves as professionals and to their discipline, Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. A significant facet of the education process there -- access to the curriculum development process -- remains almost entirely out of the hands of the subclass the PUK hiring practices create. Exclusion from that process is evidence of the schools refusal to include non-Japanese in the functions of the institution and that English as a Foreign Language is not treated as a discipline deservng the full attention of professionals. Inevitably, this policy is pursued to the detriment of the students, teachers, community, and the institution itself.
PUK began hiring full-time foreign teachers in 1982. All, until 1994, were employed on one-year appointments, were EFL teachers, and were either affiliated with the Faculty of Letters or, from 1991, with the Foreign Language Education Center. From April of 1994, five non-Japanese teachers were employed on three-year appointments. At PUK, only teachers with nationalities other than Japanese have limited-term appointments. All Japanese sennin kyouin teachers employed by PUK and Kumamoto Prefecture are in regular teaching posts available to them until retirement. This segregation of teachers into those with limited-term appointments and those with regular employment creates a disenfranchised subclass of teachers. This subclass is not trusted with the creation of curriculum, is ineligible for opportunities to study abroad, and is excluded from the organs of university life that support and encourage regular teachers to succeed in this particular system.
At PUK, the non-Japanese subclass is comprised almost entirely of EFL teachers. The only exception is a Korean teacher of economics, who has a three-year appointment. In 1991, when the Foreign Language Center was opened to service PUK as a whole, curriculum development was out of the hands of the qualified teachers who would actually be teaching the classes. When new teachers arrived on April 1, 1991, to begin teaching classes that began in that month, the "curriculum" was handed to them, and a shabby piece of work it was. It was simply a time schedule with names of classes in boxes. When teachers, uncomfortable with the lack of course descriptions, went to speak to the faculties for whom they were teaching, they were told that there was no need for descriptions. Eventually all classes taught by non-Japanese teachers may revert to teachers of Japanese nationality, and they did not want to be limited by a curriculum or course descriptions.
The next opportunity for non-Japanese teachers to be involved in curriculum development came in late 1992 and early 1993. PUK, then a womens college, was to expand to include men and a new faculty, the Faculty of Administration. To make this new school attractive, the university was to offer English on a scale unavailable at almost any other institution, and, to insure a quality program, the prefectures bureau in charge of colleges vested the non-Japanese teachers with the power to develop the new curriculum. The Japanese teachers would be "hands off." It seemed an exciting breakthrough: finally English teachers who would be responsible for teaching the classes could decide what would be taught. That fantasy was short lived; soon we were told by a senior professor that, in fact, the foreign teachers were "hands off" -- excluded from the decision-making processes. Professionals who would be responsible for a set of classes for the next four years would have no input. When the bureaucrats from the Archives Division of the prefecture returned to collect their curriculum, they found that the documentation was not at all what had been expected, and they had very little time to seek improvements. For the next four years that document, a fait accompli, was the English curriculum for the faculty.
At the March 31, 1998, end of the four-year probation period enforced by Monbusho on the new faculty, it again became possible to redefine the EFL program in the Faculty of Administration. Again well-intentioned professors asked for opinions from the subclass. By then, the non-Japanese teachers of English were fragmented by differing employment conditions, personal and professional interests, and the need to secure alternative employment. Finally, they put forth a two-page list of suggestions for the faculty to consider. None were accepted.
The EFL teachers at PUK would have another chance to influence the curriculum sooner than they expected, however. In early 1998, the university president, Mr. Teshima, instituted a Foreign Language Curriculum Revision Committee as a means of eliminating the teachers in the Kumamoto General Union. Only two non-Japanese EFL teachers were on the committee; both had three-year appointments. With the terrified silence or indifference of most teachers, the president and his henchmen rammed a revised curriculum through committees in little more than six months. Recommendations by EFL teachers were ignored. Pleas by the few vocal opponents of the destruction of the language program were ignored. Without the interdiction of the Kumamoto Labor Board and its role in facilitating an agreement between the Kumamoto Prefecture and Kumamoto General Union, the effects on the teachers, students, and community would have been catastrophic. The number of classes was reduced. Class sizes were doubled. The Open University Program, a university effort to open courses to the public, had no English course offerings for the first time since 1991. The English Teachers Recurrent Seminar, in existence since 1991 for junior and senior high school English teachers, was canceled. Again, EFL teachers witnessed a curriculum created by noneducators for the purpose, not of sound education, but the elimination of perceived troublemakers.
In his preface to The Language Teaching Matrix (1990) Jack Richards says, ". . . an effective second language program depends upon careful information gathering, planning, development, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation." I will use those prerequisites for effective programming for comparison with the criteria the university actually employed.
The first requirement is "careful information gathering." EFL teachers had been gathering information about classes and student needs for some time. Several had been accumulating data for years. All the data suggested that some students were interested in taking foreign language classes other than English; that students felt the need to become more proficient in a second language, most importantly English; and a vast majority of students wanted more offerings with fewer students in each class. One professor of the Faculty of Administration collected verbally transmitted comments from students, which had been transcribed by teachers of other subjects. The list of comments was interpreted to mean that students were dissatisfied generally with the courses being offered, that they wanted more foreign languages other than English, and that students wanted more classes in translation. They were also interpreted to mean that the present teachers of English were responsible for any shortcomings despite their teaching a curriculum that they had no hand in developing. Information gathered by English teachers about the English program was ignored, and planning continued.
The issue continued with an interesting take on nationality. The Curriculum Reevaluation Committee had purposely decided to avoid all references to nationality in the planning stages. This decision created strange dynamics, as the intention of the committee to eliminate the positions of non-Japanese teachers who had been active in the labor struggle became obvious. In discussions of content of classes for the Faculty of Administration, descriptions including the Japanese phrases dokai ryoku (reading) and hatsugen ryoku (expression) appeared. When I asked my Japanese colleagues about what they had in mind by those words, their reply was translation. When I pointed out that none of the English teachers in the faculty were interested in or qualified for teaching translation, and that it was another field of endeavor, not EFL, the reply was that they would have to get Japanese teachers. The fact that nationality was not to be discussed, however, led these teachers to take their views underground; they never appeared on paper. (The issue reemerged in early April this year, when one of my colleagues, who had been scheduled to teach an "expression" class, found out on April 2nd that he was not teaching it. When the teachers responsible for scheduling were questioned, their response was that the particular class was intended for a Japanese teacher. We asked to see where in the committee minutes and reports there was any reference to nationality and were told there was no such written reference. These discussions had taken place in committee and left unrecorded. The reality is that decisions had been made on the basis of nationality.)
As for the other steps of Richards criteria for an effective curriculum, "development, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation," there is the distinct possibility that none of my non-Japanese colleagues will be employed at PUK long enough to witness one cycle of the most recent curriculum or to participate in the later stages. Two of us are on one-year appointments. Six are on three-year appointments, three of which end on March 31, 2000. None of Mr. Richards prerequisites can be fulfilled without enough data collection, and the short-term nature of our positions makes that compilation a dubious endeavor. Already, our in-house journal, Language Issues: Journal of the Foreign Language Center, has suffered. The Foreword to the 1998 issue notes:
Although a glance over the four issues will show an apparently stable pool of contributors, the contractual insecurity is beginning to take its toll. Of the twelve foreign teachers who are based at the Prefectural University, three left at the end of the 1997-98 academic year, while a fourth left at the end of the previous year. All who left were employed on one-year contracts whose part-time status was in sharp contradiction to the full-time jobs they were happy to do. The insecurity generated by one- and three-year contractual terms has been exacerbated by a recent worsening of the conditions of employment.
Furthermore, at the end of the 1998-99 academic year, one each of the one-year and the three-year staff left for more secure employment. Clearly any possibility of PUKs language department being put on the publications map is being short-circuited by a system that undermines livelihoods. Thus, job security is like oxygen -- without it, research suffocates.
Still, our struggle at PUK is not only about preserving livelihoods, but also about the systematic fortification of stereotypes of the EFL teaching profession. EFL teachers are viewed as temporary, yet they are not given the chance to prove otherwise. PUK, for example, refused to give foreign EFL teachers responsibilities that would have made them more valuable to the university, proven their professionalism, and justified the need for their permanence. It is as though EFL teachers are being blamed for their own plight. Any educator knows, as should administrators, that one must establish the most effective curricula possible for students and the community, with the support and encouragement of their colleagues. But in systems like PUKs, even the establishment of the obvious involves unnecessary struggle.
PUK has decided that, instead of allowing input from the professionals who actually teach the classes or from the students who take them, it is best to sacrifice its language program to stifle dissent from the foreigners. Because neither these educators nor their many supporters have just allowed things to pass, this decision has not eliminated those teachers from the faculty or silenced them. It has, though, seriously damaged the integrity of PUKs newly accredited and promising language program. Disenfranchising educators, simply because they are foreign, does no one -- the staff, the school, or the students -- any good.
Daniel T. Kirk is an Assistant Professor (koushi) on a three-year contract at the Prefectural University of Kumamoto. He was recently passed over for promotion to Associate Professor (jokyouju) without a verbal or written explanation. One reason could be that his former job status at PUK, that of a full-timer on a one-year contract, was considered as equivalent to "part-time" (hijoukin) work and therefore countable as only one-third the number of years served. Eight years of accumulated workplace loyalty was thus reduced to six years of recorded service.
Reference
Richards, J. (1990). The Language Teaching Matrix. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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