Chapter 8: Teachers as Instructional Gatekeepers Teaching Global Citizenship in Japan’s National Geography Curriculum

This chapter describes the instructional gatekeeping of five Japanese secondary social studies teachers using the same geography textbook. Japanese teachers are often defined as homogeneous curriculum designers due to the centralized educational system and a professional identity characterized as lacking autonomy. However, the teachers’ implementation revealed varying levels of conformity to the geography textbook. Teachers’ practices of GCE also reflected a range of rationales, such as a nation-centric issues-centered approach based on premises of “global economic development” and the study of Asian issues as deliberation towards “global justice.” The chapter concludes by examining the cases from the framework of GCE (UNESCO, 2014) and typologies of global education (Gaudelli & Heilman, 2009), and suggests approaches for curricular-instructional gatekeeping to integrate global citizenship within nationally-focused citizenship curricula.