Turning social fragmentation into action through discovering relatedness

Discovering relatedness outside of a topical issue helps diverse groups to overcome differences and develop action for social change. The Kobe University addition to educational theory offers a framework to analyze and promote intersectional learning.

To achieve social change in a fragmented modern society, individuals from diverse backgrounds need to join together and develop a common plan for action. This is important especially for education related to social change, where groups of varying involvement in a particular issue, e.g., learners and teachers, interact in a structured setting. Current educational theories fall short of offering a framework of how such cultural differences between the participating individuals can be met, overcome and used as motivation for learning.

Kobe University lifelong learning researcher GOTO Satomi says: “Based on my own personal history of repressing my opinions in school to live up to what I perceived to be the expectations of the teacher, I realized that the role of the individuals’ diverse backgrounds has been neglected in education theory. But through my involvement in various volunteer activities, I realized that social issues are always also individual issues.” Consequently, she developed a new approach to intersectional learning where the individual, with its different degrees of relatedness to any given issue, takes the center stage.

In the International Journal of Lifelong Education, Goto comprehensively outlines her theory that results in each individual exhibiting a multilayered nature of issue relatedness, assuming people to be “a bundle of relationships with conscious or latent issues.” Thus, she argues, “By providing a variety of entry points for involvement in multiple themes, not just a specific social issue, a wider range of stakeholders can be involved, which will activate the field and increase collective emergence.” Not only does this theory offer a systematic way of explaining the origin of community engagement from an individual’s point of view, it can also “capture a broader range of learner transformations, rather than just the approach to a specific issue or theme, as the axis of evaluation.”

The term she uses for the degree of relatedness, the Japanese “tojisha-sei,” is interesting in itself. The word, as well as a substantial part of the theoretical body, derives from group development activities in Japan, such as the community reconstruction efforts in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake or the social movements surrounding the Minamata disease problem. In these cases, the multi-layered relatedness to a broad range of issues apart from the main issue allowed different parties to connect and, in the end, together promote movement around the main issue.

“The tojisha-sei concept helps to blur the boundaries between those who are directly involved in a particular issue/theme and those who are not, and to promote interaction between the two and the learning that results from this process,” Goto writes in the paper. For the future, she wants to explore whether and under what conditions such a realization of shared relatedness can be catalyzed practically, for example in school education. The goal of such a further development ultimately is, she writes, “helping learners become more autonomous and aware of their relationship to society.”

This research was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant 23KJ1573).

Kobe University is a national university with roots dating back to the Kobe Higher Commercial School founded in 1902. It is now one of Japan’s leading comprehensive research universities with nearly 16,000 students and nearly 1,700 faculty in 11 faculties and schools and 15 graduate schools. Combining the social and natural sciences to cultivate leaders with an interdisciplinary perspective, Kobe University creates knowledge and fosters innovation to address society’s challenges.