Abstract:

Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (hereafter referred to as RFCDC) is a new European framework to prepare students to become active global citizens in democratic societies by teaching democratic values and attitudes together with knowledge, communication skills and critical thinking. Published in 2018, the framework with 133 descriptors has been used mainly in Europe in various subjects at different educational levels. As the necessity rises to include such global citizenship education elements in Japanese curriculums, we have launched a 3-year grant-in-aid project to reflect or incorporate major descriptors of RFCDC in communication-related courses of Japanese universities (in the first phase, we selected mainly EAP/ESP/CLIL/EMI and applied linguistics courses), with a future prospect of reflecting most of the descriptors in wider-range of liberal arts subjects. First, our online survey for 158 teachers about the validity, possibility and doability of applying RFCDC descriptors showed a quite positive result as well as some challenges. We have also done interviews to 10 representative teachers to tease out possible difficulties in reflecting the descriptors in their courses and their responses were used in creating various instructional models. Secondly, we started a series of qualitative experiments in which different RFCDC descriptors were actually operationalized in teaching different-type courses. After establishing the original conceptualization and specifications for each course, 21 language and communication-related classes were taught by 9 teachers based on this new scheme. Students’ responses were generally better than those of the same classes conducted in previous semesters, but teachers reported problems such as the misfit between some teaching materials and the corresponding descriptors to be achieved, as well as the cultural barrier of developing assertive attitude and criticality leading to actions for Japanese students. Based on such feedback, we have revised the original teaching objectives tagged to RFCDC descriptors, and at the same time, started the construction of more holistic and cumulative curriculums involving a multiple number of courses offered in some specific departments, so that students can acquire major RFCDC competences in a more integrated manner.

References:
[1] Council of Europe (2018). Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture.

Keywords:

Global Citizenship Education, RFCDC descriptors, communication-related courses, Japanese universities.