Tokujiro Ninomiya

Social Studies Teacher
Kyoto City
Japan

Email: nino38@nifty.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TOKU.kyoto

Tokujiro Ninomiya has worked as a social studies teacher at a public high school for 40 years. He has worked in five schools, mainly high schools in Kyoto City, and currently works in a correspondence course. In Japanese high schools, there is a disparity in academic achievement between schools based on deviation scores. During the first half of his personal career, he worked in schools with relatively high academic achievement, and during the second half of his career, he worked in schools with many students at the lower end of the academic spectrum. In the second half of his career, he considered what academic skills his students really needed, and changed the classes he taught to a social constructional method of “MANABIAI-learning”. This method is designed to help individual students in a group learn together toward learning goals, while at the same time fostering many relationships and deepening their awareness of their membership in society. Students are asked to “ask others for help when in need” and to “feel free to offer their own resources when others ask for them”. In ethics classes, they have succeeded in establishing classes solely on the basis of dialogue, without any lectures. He learned of the existence of “philosophy cafes” held in this format, and since 2019 he has also been offering a public practice called the Miyako Philosophy Café. He is also interested in the Attitudinal Healing initiative founded by psychiatrist Dr. Jampolsky and has been holding groups in Kyoto since 2016. Inspired by these initiatives, he felt strongly about the need for a place of learning (and relationships) for adults and founded the Hacking Academy in 2020. As of April 2023, the Facebook group has nearly 300 registered peers and he had the opportunity to introduce the group at the 2022 Taos Institute Gathering virtual conference.