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This study explores understandings of “competence” as socially constructed, rather than individual qualities. Education for global competence has become an important aspect in university curriculum and the number of intercultural education programs are increasing. However, the author faces a concern that the notion of global competence is used as a new criterion that divides students, due to the overemphasis on English skills and/or international components, although global competences are said to be necessarily to bring different people together. Taking up the notions of “places” and “languages” that are socially constructed, this paper tries to expand ways in which we understand “competence”. As an exploratory study, four cases of international collaborative learning groupwork places were examined through students’ reports. The study sheds light on diverse cultures, languages, communication skills, etc. that were gathered in international collaborative learning spaces. While meanings were negotiated among group members, learning places were constructed. At the same time, competences were also practiced socially in collaboration with others. The findings suggest that it, is not enough to understand “competences” as something belonging to individuals but, needs further investigation locating them in social contexts.

In this study, the concept of the global mind which promoted the acquisition of the global competency was arranged, and the scale was developed. It was clarified that the global mind was divided into 3 factors of "Anxiety about the global society", "Clarification of global social issues and trust", and "Willingness to live in a global society". And, it was shown that the reduction of the sense of unease was a first step of the acquisition of the global mind, because the sense of unease was improved by reducing sense of unease for the global society. In addition, it was indicated that to positively learn the global liberal arts subject in the first year reduced the anxiety, and that to participate in the overseas dispatch program over storage over 1 month promotes volition improvement and clarification of the problem. In the future, it is necessary to longitudinally collect the data on the basis of these, and to clarify the effect of the GCE education for the global mind improvement.

A twenty-year-old male Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus) presented at the Rakuno Gakuen University Animal Medical Center with a 10-year history of bilateral blindness and cataracts. Surgical treatment of bilateral cataracts by extracapsular lensextraction using phacoemulsification and aspiration (PEA) was performed under general anesthesia. An anterior capsulectomy was performed using micro iris scissors and micro anterior lens capsule forceps. The cataract was removed with PEA using the two-handed technique. After surgery, systemic corticosteroids, anti-inflammatory drugs and antibiotics were administered. After cataract removal, the bear had recovered vision, and good quality vision has been maintained to date (15 months). PEA can be a safe and effective treatment for cataracts that impair vision in bears.

This paper focuses on five Japanese students who actively participated in global education programs offered at their university. Responding to the needs of rapidly changing global society, importance of fostering global competences has been very much discussed and many educational programs are now being offered at universities in Japan. The Global Human Resource Education (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), Global/Key Competence (OECD), and 21st Century Skills (The Partnership for 21st Century Learning) are educational frameworks greatly influencing the development of global education in Japanese Higher Education. Five students in this study were very aware of the expectation, placed on them by the university and the nation, to be globally competent persons. While questioning the discourse of the “Global Human Resources” as Japan-oriented concept and demeaning themselves as economic tools, they sincerely tried to make sense of what it is to be a globally competent person and what kind of person they want to become. Students picked up keywords such as English, identity, and continuous learning from the discourse of global education, however used the terms in their own ways by placing them in their local contexts. The study eliminates how each student struggled, instead of blindly accepting the dominant discourse, to grow into a person who can contribute to the global society.

The purpose of this study is to listen to teachers' stories and reconstruct their classrooms in the midst of the global upheaval of people's movements in the 1960s-70s through teachers' narratives. The primary research questions are: How did social movements in the 1960s-1970s influence their teaching practices? What was their intention and how did they carry out their daily teaching practice? In the educational research field, narrative inquirers explore teachers' stories, their life experiences and teaching practices, in order to understand how teachers view the world. I collected stories, through in-depth interviews, of ten Japanese teachers who taught in Japanese public school system, and were active in social and educational movements during the 1960s-70s in order to understand how teachers understood and resisted dominant oppressive forces which create and perpetuate social inequality. Teacher narratives were analyzed using two complementary methods: contents analysis and interactional positioning theory. First, stories of teachers' struggles in their classrooms and schools were contextualized in a wider social struggle for humanity and a more just society, in order to explore teachers' understanding of social oppression and their resistance, and multiculturalism in Japanese classrooms in the 1960s-1970s. Through their stories, an indigenous multicultural nature of Japanese classrooms was revealed, even before the multiculturalism became an imported educational topic in the 1980s. Furthermore, using interactional positioning theory, I discussed how teacher activist identities were constructed during the narration, at the same time, uncover how social stigma of being an activist possibly suppressed the participants overtly constructing an activist identity in narratives.