An exploration of learner autonomy in an international university in Japan

Sociocultural perspectives on learner autonomy demand a whole-life perspective on the learner, who has agency in the construction of their identity. The full implications of this have not until now been accounted for in learner autonomy research. Central to an understanding of the autonomy in learner autonomy from a sociocultural perspective, I argue, is the relationship between choices and values. Through participatory ethnographic inquiry that involved the iterative process of generating multimodal qualitative data and relating it to theories of learner autonomy, identity and personal autonomy, I conceive learner autonomy as: the capacity to exercise control in learning (a process of identity construction), which amounts to self-definition through self-direction on the basis of authentic values arrived at through self-reading; in relation to the affordances and constraints inherent to the embodied, sociohistorical and emplaced self. This universal construct is manifested in ways that are particular to place. In the English medium, international, liberal arts university, situated in Japan, that was the context of this inquiry, learner autonomy was manifested in students’ attempts to reconcile disruptions to their identities caused by the heterogeneity of the student body, the English (foreign) language environment and opportunities for experiencing novel ways of life. The emotional responses to these disruptions prompted self-reading, which led to self-definition and often self-direction, which were afforded by opportunities for friendships (which afforded emotional support and opportunities for value-oriented dialogue), an institutional ethos of autonomy, opportunities for the development of knowledge (which facilitated the development of knowledge of oneself in relation to the world) and support for participating in communities of practice. This thesis documents the inquiry from its autobiographical and contextual origins, through its positioning in relation to learner autonomy literature, development of the theoretical framework and research methods, presentation and interpretation of data on the learning trajectories of students at the university, and discussion of its implications for the field, for practice and for the Japanese educational context

Legal Commitments and Religious Commitments

In his elegant and accessible new book, Law\u27s Quandary, Steven Smith groups our various senses of what is real for us into ontological families: the mundane; the scientific, including mathematics; and the religious. These supply lumberyards, as it were, for thought and discussion about the world and action in it. Law itself is not one of them. Those involved in law, as citizens or professionals practicing law or speaking for or about law, are presented in the book as looking out from law to the ontological resources available in the lumberyards he describes

Off the Ball: Ethnicity, Commercialism and Australian Football, 1974-2004

Despite its seemingly marginal role in Australian sport, football (soccer) contributed significantly to public debates regarding multiculturalism and imagined Australian national identity. This thesis explores the relationship between the ongoing de-ethnicisation of Australian football and the game’s rapid commercialisation. I contend that the introduction of a new professional competition in 2004 rounded out decades of attempts by football administrators to downplay the ethnic image of the game in order to sell the game to a ‘mainstream’ audience

Justice, Bureaucracy, and Legal Method

In the real world justice denied is not justice. Talking from the beginning about access to justice, rather than simply justice, emphasizes in a salutary way this commonplace of citizen and client. Justice that is inaccessible, delayed, refused does not just sit there glowing like a grail, which those separated from it may contemplate and yearn for. It is only in imagining that justice is available to someone, and in imagining what it would be like to be that someone, that one can see the thing as justice at all. To put it in economic terms, justice is not a commodity, the production of which can be analyzed apart from its distribution. Who gets justice very much determines what it is they are getting, whether, that is, it is justice. But this said, it is also true that there must be something going on inside the legal system that makes worthwhile all the efforts to gain access to it. Justice may not be justice if someone does not have it, but someone can have all there is to have and still not have justice. There can be full access, and still no justice. Arrangements can be made so that everyone can crowd around the table, but there must be something more than cold and empty plates there. What one has access to is surely as important as the access, and it is this, the what, that I wish to talk about in this paper

The Filaments of the Vicarious

Forty years is the unit of work in focus here. You have or will have units of forty years of your own, a unit of work like this. I hope what you are doing for me is also for you and your work and your encourage-ment about the decades behind you or to come. I can best respond to your generosity with a look back at the course of this effort of mine and its internal and external connections over time, to illustrate and help us keep in mind the way we mutually influence each other in our thought and lives. If the effort of one of us rounded into a unit is made an occasion to bring us together and a focus for reflection on where we are in our per-ception and development, it needs its context

Jack Sammons as Therapist

Jack Sammons is well known as a pioneer in making the practice of law a field of academic study and teaching. He is also an original and penetrating analyst of law as such. This essay comments on his recent work, especially his putting the way we understand law and the way we understand music side by side and drawing out the parallels between them. Many will find his work a revelation

Letter From Joseph Ginet 05

Joseph Ginet writes to his friends about Christmas dinner invitations

Jack Sammons as Therapist

Jack Sammons is well known as a pioneer in making the practice of law a field of academic study and teaching. He is also an original and penetrating analyst of law as such. This essay comments on his recent work, especially his putting the way we understand law and the way we understand music side by side and drawing out the parallels between them. Many will find his work a revelation

The Mystery of the Individual in Modern Law

To their murderers these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals. This was Telford Taylor, beginning the presentation of the Medical Case at the Nuremberg Trials. The Medical Case was not about genocide or war or the conduct of war. It was about experimentation on human beings, and it was this trial that produced the Nuremberg Code, the first control of such treatment of human beings by one another, so surprisingly late in the history of modern scientific investigation, midtwentieth century, and so surprisingly absent everywhere before, despite the ancient law of assault and homicide