Credit Where It's Due: In Japan
TC's Japan Campus has been officially accredited by the Japanese government. The school's new accredited status, awarded by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, means that Japanese graduates of the 20-year-old institution, now officially known as a "Foreign Graduate School, Japan Campus" can use the credits they've earned to apply for higher degrees at Japanese universities.
Established in 1987, TC's Suidobashi, Tokyo, campus offers a master's degree program that is an extension of the College's Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program in New York. The Japan TESOL program has produced more than 400 graduates, but because it was not accredited, it typically attracted only teachers seeking to improve their own skills as English speakers.
Though TC has a gifted education program based in Long Island and a music education program in Taiwan, the Japan site becomes the College's only officially accredited branch campus. TC Professor Emeritus John Fanselow founded the campus in collaboration with Professor Leslie Beebe.
"Having an accredited campus in another part of the world gets to the heart of a vision of internationalism in education and gives you new ways to make that a reality," says Graeme Sullivan, Professor of Arts Education, who chairs TC's Arts and Humanities Department, which oversees the TESOL program. "Ideally, you don't want to talk for another culture--you want to let people from that culture talk for themselves and provide an environment where that can happen."
Published Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2007