Transferring Literacy and Subject Knowledge Between Disparate Educational Systems

This is a retrospective longitudinal study of the education of two Australian third-culture kids who attended local Japanese schools from pre-school to the first year of high school. This is a postmodern account, set in the twenty-first century, of transition to a radically different educational system. Many postmodern accounts describe obtaining an education in a new country due to migration in order to escape persecution (e.g.: Antin, 1997; Hoffman, 1989). In contrast, the current study explores an alternative educational choice made by parents who had relocated to a remote region of Japan for employment. The choice to educate their children locally was due to both an interest in and respect for the local culture, as well as convenience. This account concerns their daughters’ experience of the Japanese public school curriculum from the first year of primary school to the first year of high school, and how this equipped them for the final two years of high school and beyond. In particular, it addresses the ways in which they viewed their learning in Years 11 and 12, and at the tertiary level in Australia, to have been influenced by their experiences of the Japanese curriculum.