Welcome to POD

    Power of Diversity is a group whose purpose is  theorization of learning activities thatmotivate the children’s learning, who have some roots in overseas and havediverse cultural backgrounds. Here we call them ‘learners’, indicate basicallythe people who live beyond the cultural borders, namely ‘immigrants’ in thebroad sense, no matter what nationality they are and including not only thefirsts, but the children or the grandchildren of them. We also regard them as‘linguistically culturally diverse children’ or ‘diverse children’ in the sensethat they have rich and diverse resources.

    Our groupis promoting collaborative research with practitioners supporting children’s learning and development in andout of Japan. It doesn’t matter how old children are, and the supportingmembers are also diverse. In this research there are of course the principlechildren, high school and college students, local residents, educators, andresearchers. In Japan, the support for children’s learning is as yet centeredupon schools, and also many of after school projects seem to be based onschools as the models. However, present Japanese schools are not entirely richenvironment for diverse children. There will be needed an idea that go beyondschools, and furthermore, schools are needed to be better too. We have beenaiming at constructing the learning theory on the basis of singularity of everyregion in Japan, cooperating with North American research groups that havealready been continuously conducting such practices.Apractice to support ‘the poor children’, in other words, ‘children suffering inlearning’, leads them into ‘those who never have confidence’. How can we revise the situation in whichchildren do have rich resources but they can’t take full advantage of them? Weneed to think about it by joining together with diverse children and diversepractitioners.

    To boost children’s self-esteem,it is important for them to engage in the ‘self-expression activities’. We callthem ‘Literacy activities’, in which not only reading and writing, butperformance and expressions using diverse media are included. Practically, itis known that scholastic succession is not extraneous to the ability to expressoneself. Development of children basically supports their learning.

     We are the group ofresearchers who specialize educational psychology, developmental psychology, linguisticeducation, Japanese education, and social education, and especially enjoyingcollaboration with the people who want to study their own practices, or who areinterested in diverse children and those practices. If you are one of them,please feel free to ask and contact us.

                                                                   April 2013,

                                                                  Chief researcher 

 Hiroaki Ishiguro, Rikkyo University