Disrupting discipline based learning: integrating English and programming education

ABSTRACT This discussion examines the ever-increasing impact of top-down nation-wide educational reforms on teachers in Japan, exemplified in the 2020 reform. Its unique contribution is a suggestion of an interdisciplinary framework: programming education and English as a foreign language education in elementary schools. Many elementary school teachers are not specialists in computer programming or English education as discipline specialties, yet they face the obligation to teach both subject areas under the authority of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Their lack of training in these curricular areas creates a high level of anxiety as they initially perceived daunting new challenges in their work performances. Concerning programming education, many teachers are not even digital natives, working in schools where “IT rooms [are] covered with dust”. The research highlighted here resulted from the authors’ engagement in professional development workshops for teachers, Integrated Programming English Education, demonstrating how much these two disciplines share commonalities and how teachers can effectively use them in their daily teaching. The study results reveal how interdisciplinary frameworks can disrupt deficit norms in teaching single-disciplinary subjects overly used in Japanese education, and simultaneously increase teacher agency through the connectivity of programming and English language education.