Keita Takayama (1973 - )

Short Biography & Significant Contribution

Keita Takayama is an Associate Professor at the School of Education, the University of New England, Australia. Professor Takayama has published extensively in the areas of comparative education, sociology of education and curriculum studies. Professor Takayama has been instrumental in promoting a better understanding of the implications of globalisation to education practice, policy and theory both within and beyond Australia. In particular, his work on OECD’s PISA and its implication for national education policy making has been widely recognized.

Born and bred in Tokyo, Japan, he was educated at Sophia University in Japan, where he gained his BA degree and Middle School teaching certificate (English Language). He subsequently gained his MA degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada. After spending a year teaching in Southern India and a year and half in a high school and a college in Tokyo, Professor Takayama won the Fulbright graduate fellowship to undertake his doctoral study at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Upon completing his Ph.D. degree, Professor Takayama joined the Social Contexts of Teaching and Research group at the University of New England in 2008, where he teaches and coordinates a wide range of undergraduate- and graduate-level units in sociology of education, curriculum studies, multicultural/antiracist education and comparative and international education. He also provides doctoral supervision to students researching education policy issues within and outside of Australia.

Professor Takayama has extensive international teaching experience. He has taught primary, middle school and college students, adults and pre-service teachers in countries, including Vancouver (Canada), Bangalore (India), Tokyo (Japan), Madison (USA) and Armidale (Australia). Building on his international teaching experience and research, Professor Takayama currently has two research focuses with the first being the globalisation of educational policy and the second, the globalisation of educational knowledge and research. In the area of the globalisation of educational policy, he is particularly interested in understanding the changing nature of education policy that is simultaneously de-territorialised and re-territorialised and the emerging policy phenomena associated with this change. Under this context of change, he is also interested in the increasing prominence of transnational organisations such as OECD and the emergence of new actors in educational policy making and their implications for educational governance and equality.

His second research focus on the globalisation of educational knowledge and research is concerned with exploring the different ways of engaging with educational scholarship produced outside the English-using academic communities around the world. As a bi-lingual and bi-discoursal researcher, Professor Takayama draws upon his knowledge of Japanese and Asian education scholarship to denaturalize the common sense of educational scholarship in the English-using scholarly communities. He attempts to articulate a dialogic space in educational research where different research traditions and epistemologies are recognized as epistemic resources to push the existing boundaries of educational knowledge. For him, these two research focuses are closely intertwined as the focus on the globalisation of educational knowledge and research always forces him to be reflexive about the body of knowledge that he draws upon to participate in academic discourses in the English-using education scholarship. Professor Takayama’s significant contribution to his field is evident through his impressive list of publications in scholarly journals, both in English and Japanese, in the fields of comparative & international education, education policy, sociology of education and curriculum studies.

His contributions have been recognised by the Comparative and International Education Society (USA) through the award of the George Bereday Award in 2010. Professor Takayama currently sits on the international editorial advisory board for the Asia Pacific Journal of Education. He has delivered a number of invited keynote speeches to scholarly communities in Australia, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand.