Industry Collaboration

So for some background, I teach in Japanese universities. While most of my classes are English, I also teach a few oddball classes. These are Observing Economics, Law, and the World and Situations in Economics and Management. These are both classes at Tohoku Bunka Gakuen University in Sendai city. The latter is one of the classes on the Inquiry and Understanding Project, and the former is an elective for first year students in the Department of Business Law. These are classes that I teach together with the dean of the department, Fumihiko Tanabe. They are also, by far, my most enjoyable classes. They are not English classes, but they both use English as part of their structure in order to further the students' understanding of the content and develop their basic communication and expression capabilities. They are also by far the most complex classes I have created.

Observing Economics, Law, and the World is basically similar in structure to my normal English classes. The main differences, though, are that there are 5 game days where we do physical activities and the themes of the other class days are more focused on themes directly connected with the target abilities of the games. Situations in Economics and Management, however, is quite far from that. The first year of the class was a bit unfocused, to say the least. It covered a lot of areas including leadership, communication, organization theory, and social construction. This made it unfocused by nature, and we made several huge mistakes in both how we selected students who could take the class as well as with the total number of students. There were too many students, and most ended up being totally unmotivated to actually care about the content and activities we had prepared. So for this year's class we ended up doing the only thing that made sense. Totally renovating into something that only resembles the previous incarnation in name. We decided to make it a business ethics class.

The Class

In order to focus in on the theme of ethics and business, we decided to cut down the amount of content into just a few key areas. These ended up being:

What is Ethics?

Unethical Action

Communication and Ethics

Culture and Ethics

The remaining days were allocated to a much more stringent selection process, introducing the class content and process, two days of review, two days of learning interviews, and the final reflection composition on the final day. That left a total of three class sessions left. I'll get to how we used those later.

An Aside

Before I continue, I should give some context. Around November of last year, I became acquainted with a company in Sendai called Pallet1 that works in the field of coaching, communication training, and organization development. I originally discovered them through luck. As organization development is one of the areas of industry I focus on in my field (Communication Studies), I decided to search and see if there are any companies in Sendai in that area. I first encountered Pallet that way. Coincidentally, they had just opened up an internship targeted at university students. The issue, however, is that as a teacher, if I introduce some kind of program like that to my students and they have a bad time that becomes my responsibility.

I needed to confirm that they are decent people and that I wouldn't be putting my students into a tough situation. So I took the most direct option and directly sent them an email. I got a quick response, and ended up setting up an online meeting with their communications manager. However, they also invited me to attend a joint conference they were hosting with U-media2, the largest local media and publishing company in Miyagi. I decided to attend, and I am quite glad that I did.

See if you can spot me. What struck me was that despite being very obviously non-Japanese and not having any strong connection to anyone there yet, I was immediately accepted as someone who had valuable insights into the field and the situation in Tohoku (living in Miyagi for 10 years definitely helped). After both the conference and the online meeting a week later, I felt that Pallet and their work was facing the same direction as me and my work. After that, I continued to attend their monthly discussion groups.

I've been enjoying my time with everyone quite a bit. During those meetings, though, I heard about an issue that seemed to be recurring. Many of the attendees were having trouble working together with fresh graduates and other young new hires. I felt that this mirrored a discussion that Tanabe-sensei and I have consistently been having recently. Despite being a business department, our students don't often have that many opportunities to interact with industry professionals, and the opportunities that do exist currently are most just one-way information sessions. This led me to have what I felt was a great idea.

Why don't I ask Pallet to collaborate with our class?

Back to the Class

Those three sessions I mentioned previously became a three-session collaborative workshop with Pallet. I met with them at their office, went over our content, and told them that my goal was for the students to work with professionals rather than just listen to professionals talk. While I hoped they would connect their workshops with the content we were teaching and the overall theme of business ethics, I told them that they had the freedom to do what they felt was most appropriate and useful for the students and that I would adapt to that.

The approach itself is a bit risky. If we, the teachers, don't maintain a good relationship with our guests, the project will crash and burn. Likewise, if we don't maintain a strong relationship with our students, then there's no reason for them to trust that we have their best interests in mind while working with the company. And if the representatives from the company can't adapt to the students, the workshop will break down. There's a lot of things that have to go right and a lot of possible points of failure.

This week we carried out the second of the three workshops. The first one was activity-focused. The students had to put a series of pictures in the proper order. Each pair of students had one picture. They could explain it in words, but they could neither show the picture to others nor use gestures. They had 15 minutes to complete the task. What caught me off guard, though, was how seriously our students took the task. At the end of the time, one team had successfully arranged the picture properly, and the other team had only on minor mistake. They repeated the activity again, but this time with only 10 minutes and a new set of pictures. Again, one team arranged the pictures perfectly and the other had only very minor mistakes.

My students, 1st year students only 3 months out of high school, were able to complete a challenging activity that many workers at Japanese companies consistently fail at.

I'll end this post here, but I will continue the story later. There's still one more week of collaborative workshops, so I will discuss the content in more detail once I have had some time to think upon it.

However, before I close, I want to share one insight I gained from my experience setting all of this up. I believe that there is often a wall between the professional world and the world of education. This wall is particularly strong in Japan. There are many educators who want to connect with companies like Pallet to help expand their class past what is just possible on their own. Likewise, there are many companies like Pallet that want to contribute to society and the growth and development of young people. But both sides don't exactly know how to best go about connecting with the other. When the opportunity emerges, both sides will often do their best to help the other. The tricky part is finding ways to connect them. In this case, that link was me. I believe that both now and in the future, educators and academics will need to look more and more towards what is outside of the social world of the school in order to find new benefits for their students. This can be scary and requires trust at every step of the process. The purpose of education is not to create workers. However, the responsibility of education (and the educators who make it happen) is to help guide students into becoming people who can actively find their way in society. Collaboration between the school and the outside world is necessary, and I'm glad that I have able to create something valuable together with the other teachers, with the professionals at Pallet, and, most importantly, with my students.

Learn more about them here: https://pallet.work/

Learn more about them here: https://www.u-media.jp/