KYUSHU UNIVERSITYe教員ハンドブック

Menu

Education

KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools

KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools is offered to graduate students at Kyushu University and, coordinated by the Faculty of Arts and Science, is run on the basis of university-wide cooperation. Some of the subjects were launched in the 2015 academic year and the program went into full-scale operation in the 2016 academic year.

○Philosophy

KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools seeks to supplement the solid academic framework cultivated through specialist graduate school education by instilling in graduate students a broad, sophisticated outlook and thinking skills. Its aim in doing so is to nurture personnel capable of addressing the problems and issues faced by contemporary society in a creative and critical way through innovative and flexible thinking, as well as designing constructive solutions. Based on the same approach used in KIKAN Education in the bachelor’s degree programs, KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools further enhances the fundamentals of learning already cultivated, namely graduate students’ ability to learn about ways of looking at and thinking about things, and ways of learning, along with their desire to seek the truth and continue learning autonomously.

○Purpose

By regarding KIKAN Education as the fundamentals of education, Kyushu University’s goal is to cultivate active learners capable of continuing to learn autonomously. Accordingly, KIKAN Education should not end with undergraduate education. It needs to be sustained and developed in coordination with the KIKAN Education programs for first-year and higher-year undergraduate students. As a program focused on the fundamentals of learning, KIKAN Education must also play an important role in graduate school education.

Naturally, the main emphasis of graduate school education remains the specialist education provided by each advanced course. As such, KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools should complement specialist education. Based on this way of thinking, the objective of the KIKAN subject clusters that should be at the heart of KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools is to develop a set of universal abilities and lay the foundations of the knowledge and skills that graduate students will require in the future as professionals with advanced knowledge or as educators and researchers. Thus, the program aims to cultivate high-end literacy that puts the finishing touches on students’ KIKAN Education.

As with KIKAN Education for bachelor’s degree programs, the KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools program will offer new types of subjects with a focus on interactivity and student activity, avoiding classroom learning centered solely on the transmission of knowledge. By learning and working with students from different fields of specialism, graduate students in the process of acquiring advanced expertise will be able to master methods and skills for identifying and solving problems in a practical way, based on comprehensive consideration of diverse perspectives. The program’s subject clusters aim to develop universal abilities that are applicable in every field and cultivate a multifaceted understanding of complex problems, while also providing knowledge and skills that will be of practical use in the pursuit and development of research in students’ specialist fields. We will aim to provide subjects that faculty members will recommend to the students under their guidance (focusing on the organic and complementary benefits from the perspective of their research group activities).

○Composition

KIKAN Education for Graduate Schools consists of Core Subjects, which are mainly subjects that conform to the philosophy and objectives of the program, and Special Skill Development Courses, which are independent courses offered by centers and graduate schools.

These independent courses are positioned as Special Skill Development Courses following screening of proposals for their establishment.(As a general rule, the party delivering the course is responsible for covering the costs and staffing of the course)

Course proposals for the first semester are to be submitted in January of the previous academic year, while those for the second semester are to be submitted in July of the academic year in question. Please get in touch with the relevant point of contact for details of procedures.

We endeavor to schedule these classes at times when it is easy for graduate students to attend, such as during the 5th and 6th or as intensive lectures on a Saturday or Sunday.