How to Excavate "Good Sense" in International Educational Development: The "Middle Way" Approach to the EDU-Port Japan
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(Published version)
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2025
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Takayama, K.
Okitsu, T.
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Faul, M.V.
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Book chapter
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Source details - Title: Transforming Development in Education, 2025 / Faul, M.V. (ed./s), Ch.10, pp.175-201
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This chapter explores the "middle way" approach to researching international education development projects, where an attempt is made to merge the criticality of social research and the pragmatic concerns of policy actors. This is pursued within the context of our recently completed research project on Japan's education export/cooperation scheme, "EDU-Port Japan." Since the publication of the evaluation report commissioned by the Ministry of Education, we have engaged in a series of presentations and publications drawn from the report, which offered us numerous opportunities to revisit the entire research process and reflect on what we could have done differently in the report. This partly self-reflective account aims to show how our approach to EDU-Port has evolved over time, not only through the researching process for the report but also through our post-research dialogs, eventually helping us articulate what we call the "middle way" approach. This chapter concludes with a call for more contextualized research on international education development pursued by emerging non-Western powers as well as an exploration of how such studies might help us imagine a more ethically defensible mode of international education development and a closer alignment between critical researchers and education policy actors.
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Copyright 2025 Edward Elgar (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Access Condition Notes: This is an open access article