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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the diversity of active learning objectives and practices within English-based liberal arts higher education institutions supported by the MEXT internationalization policy, especially since the beginning of the Top Global University Project in 2014.

Paper long abstract

In the last two decades, the number of international students enrolled in Japanese higher education programmes has sharply increased (JASSO, 2024), while many English-based liberal arts education programmes were created. High ranked Japanese universities are engaged in intense competition to internationalize their curriculum and student base, actively supported by the Ministry of Education (MEXT). The Top Global University Project (TGU, Sūpāgurōbaru daigaku sōsei shien) launched in 2014, granting funding to 37 top universities for internationalisation, included active learning (akutibu rāningu) as a key performance indicator (MEXT, 2021). However, the meaning of active learning remains absent. Policy documents, scholarly papers and practitioner literature reveals a wide range of practices under this umbrella concept. A few widely accepted examples in higher education include learning by doing, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and serious games. This creates ambiguity in what deserves or not to be considered as “true” active learning pedagogy (Ito and Takeuchi, 2022; Onozuka et al., 2024).

This paper explores the empirical diversity of the pedagogical methods used in liberal arts education programs labialized as active learning to reveal how universities conceptualise internationalization and global competence?

It will rely on two types of data to try drawing a connection between official ambitions and concrete in-class practice, in-between teachers’ understandings of the notion. An analysis of the various discourses on active learning raised by English-based liberal arts education institutions and a focus on some pedagogical experiments conducted by teachers. Among them will be analysed four experiments conducted by the presenter in two beneficiary institutions of the TGU project, Waseda University’s School of International Liberal Studies (SILS) and Rikkyo University’s Global Liberal Arts Program (GLAP), between 2018 and 2025.