Lately, Professor Kano Yamamoto, of the international studies department at Tokyo's International Christian University (ICU), has been busy not only with his research and teaching but with fielding a growing number of inquiries from other university teachers around Japan. And it is not because he has found a successful formula for picking winners among the moribund Nikkei composite of leading Japanese stocks. It is because everyone wants to know about his novel service-learning programmes.
Professor Yamamoto, who is director of the university's 10-month-old service-learning centre, is pioneering a unique educational method, which has quickly attracted the attention of educators in Japan and elsewhere in Asia.
Service learning tries to foster a long-term commitment to public service among students by requiring them to engage in off-campus activities linked to their academic curriculums.
Typically, college students lend a hand at soup kitchens, women's shelters, public hospitals and other community organisations. At ICU, more than 20 students are participating in service learning this summer.
'Service learning is an experiential education in which students can develop and nurture their sense of civic responsibility in a dramatic way that they can't find elsewhere,' said Professor Yamamoto, who worked at the Bank of Japan and Unicef before entering academia.
The modern service-learning movement began in the United States in the 1970s, where it spread among higher-education institutions and to some parts of Europe.
After hearing about the scheme through the International Partnership of Service Learning of the United States, a non-profit organisation founded in New York in 1982, Professor Yamamoto last summer organised the first Asian conference on service learning, at ICU, along with the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia.
