Practitioner advocates in Japan: bringing in knowledge of practice for policy translation

This paper examines mechanisms in the Japanese education system that ‘bring in’ knowledge of practice to the process of policy translation. The paper firstly draws on the enactment of recent curriculum reforms in Japan to define a group of actors – practitioner advocates – who utilise their identity as members of the teaching community to mediate and translate policies, from a position outside the school and often outside the municipality. Their collaboration with school administrators and teachers effectuates policy transactions that make sense to teachers, developed in reference to knowledge of practice but legitimised in reference to policy, bending its meanings. Secondly, examining the work of practitioner advocates invites questions that might otherwise go unasked, and provides a fresh perspective on the particularity of the Anglo-American context. It draws attention to the possibility that the Anglo-American structural, institutional or cultural context is peculiarly susceptible to a kind of deliverological managerialism that shuts out experience of practice.