EBA

Evidence Based Approach (EBA)An Innovation in Higher Education

Vu Le Thao Chi
Project Assistant Professor, Faculty of Policy Management, Keio University

Abstract:

Mass education is to create standardized men (citizens) through universal
institutions -- formal schools -- for building a nation-state. Higher education is
expected to follow this to meet the nation’s higher demand for the individualsof outstanding quality. The Evidence Based Approach, more than a trainingin-research method, is an innovative response to the demand for upgrading thequality of learning at higher education. EBA promotes two-way interactions
between teachers and students through distinctly different learning environmentsof conventional classrooms, a cyberspace, and the “field,” the living environments
in Asia. By going through these environments, students have an excellent
opportunity to learn through a best mix of the “mediated” knowledge (fromteachers) and the “experienced” knowledge (by themselves).

EBA
EBA

Keywords: e d or

earninno ed e prod c ion s pervised e perience24

Evidence Based Approach (EBA)

1 Introduction
Higher education is one important step to bring the students closer
to specialized professions with high and possibly tested skills, with thegoals of bringing out the students’ untapped potentials and especially theirindividualities (what each individual is capable of) to meet the higher
demands of an ever-growing society. Their qualities and individualities aremeasured not only by the ability to absorb knowledge but, more importantly,
by the ability to apply and create knowledge in real-life contexts. That thestudents master theories, practices and innovations, and therefore, can be “bestused” upon graduation is the optimal goal of higher education.
However, a great deal of distance separates “theories” and “practice,”
their actual utility, and has always been one of the most difficult to calculate
how far. According to one survey (2014) by AACU (Association of American
Colleges & Universities), of the 17 “outcome” (of the higher education) areas
tested, the most highly valued by 400 surveyed employers include: written
and oral communication, teamwork skills, ethical decision-making, criticalthinking and the ability to apply knowledge in the real-world settings. But
only one-quarter of the surveyed employers say that the recent graduates arewell prepared in these requirements, meaning the majority of the employers,
accounting for the remaining three quarters (75%), think the graduates
are not qualified to be “used” right away for failing some of the essential
requirements including “thinking critically,” “communicating clearly” and“solving problems.” Given this situation, there is one suggestion from theemployers’ side that the students should complete a “significant appliedlearning project” before graduating from college [1].
This “significant applied learning project” idea comes close to the idea of“learning by doing” which was conceived by pragmatist John Dewey as early
as 1916 [2] and later became “supervised practical experience” expressed indifferent terms such as “practicum, internship, externship, field placement,
field study, fieldwork, field observation” [3]. This “supervised practical
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experience” is more systematic and compulsory in medical training. For a
medical profession, he or she is required to have this “supervised practicalexperience” at hospitals after graduation for at least one year or more,
depending on the country, in order to be qualified as a medical doctor.
However, unlike the pre-medical students, those aspiring to seek
employment in other professions are not always offered with, or required tohave, anything similar to this “supervised practical experience.” It is usually
still up to the proactiveness of students -- especially in the non-engineering
fields -- to find such opportunities for themselves, and not to the institutionsof which they are part.
The paper aims to illuminate some of the problems associated with thegeneral lack of the “supervised practical experience” at higher educational
institutions, and to evaluate how EBA, as initiated and practiced by Keio
University as such an effort, or anything similar to it, can fill this void.

2 The Problem: No Place for the Self in Learning
Learning, as def ined by Oxford dictionary, is the acquisition ofknowledge and skills through study, experience, or being taught [4]. As briefly
mentioned in the introduction, there has been an imbalance between “learning
through study and being taught” and “learning through experience.” Of these,
the former has enjoyed a lopsided allocation of time and other resources in
its favor at the cost of the latter. This imbalance is most glaring especially inthe non-engineering fields at the higher educational institutions.
Advent of information technology especially in multiplying our ability
to acquire what we look for, or in the vast improvement of the platform on
which we seek things we look for, has not led to the corresponding correctionof that imbalance. The introduction of Internet into higher educational
institutions as well as its omnipresence in our daily life has not necessarily
made this picture look any brighter. What lies in the way of remedying
the imbalance is the prevalence of the tendency to take information at its

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face value and little or no training in how to make sense from the collected
information. The well-planned curriculum with its almost exclusive focus
on the student life within the physical confine of the campus, and thesemester-based time boundary is also a hidden barrier toward correcting thisimbalance.
Internet definitely has made the information “acquisition” more cost(time)-efficient, more convenient and faster. Most of us, as blissful users,
have taken the omnipresence of internet for granted and only enjoyed this“shortest-cut” to a seemingly bottomless reservoir of information from thisplatform. Within the very short history of 40 years, Internet, originally amilitary communication network, has become a vast cyberspace where moredata has been generated, circulated and distributed than ever before.
Internet has also penetrated deeply into our daily life through Internetof Things (IoT) -- “seamless network of everyday objects” [5], connecting
any physical objects (devices) to the Internet and enabling them to collectand exchange data among them, and control their movements. Currently,
there are more than 20 billion objects/devices connected to Internet andit is estimated by 2025, the number will jump up to 75 billion [6]. Data on
just about everything involving people’s life, in its increasingly voluminous
amount, therefore, will be generated and stored by the devices themselves
without the need for humans to constantly enter, monitor and examine it.
“They (computers) can see, hear, and smell the world for themselves” [7].
With its far-reaching influence in our social life, the inclusion of Internet inhigher education institutions, with the difference in degree only, to createa robust infrastructure to facilitate the teaching and learning has become
an irreversible trend. The increase in the availability of and accessibility
to information is, without a doubt, of great assistance to the learning ofstudents.
But this convenience can become a double-edged sword. Students
may be better and quicker at acquiring but not necessarily at choosing the
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information of relevance. Critical thinking among students -- that is, theability to question the value of the acquired information in order to use it
more selectively, properly and convincingly does not seem to have a placein the process. Just imagine, all students have to do these days is to turn on
laptops, computers or smartphones to find the answers to questions, nearlyany question, immediately, often times without even the need to precisely
paraphrase the questions on hand.
One research done by a group of American psychologists found out thatpeople are “primed to think about computers and that when people expect
to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of theinformation itself and enhanced recall instead for where to assess it,” andtherefore, “once information has been accessed, our internal encoding
is increased for where the information is to be found rather than theinformation itself.” Memory then becomes just an “external or transactive
memory where information is stored collectively outside ourselves” [8]. Our
memory now only serves as a transition mode and information or knowledge-- a set of processed information -- do not become part of ourselves. In
that sense, the abundance together with the convenience of Internet is notnecessarily a blessing to the process of learning for the students.
Learning, in Japanese, also means “bring it close to your body” (“mini tsukeru” --, or more liberally,). Thisunderstanding provides a good insight into the nature of “learning,” in whichlearning should not be only the acquisition of information. It also entails
the process of bringing that information closer to the body -- or the self -of the learner. It involves the turning of information into knowledge, thatis, selecting from the acquired information to make a coherent set for given
purposes [9].
“Bring it close to the body” calls for an element of intimacy between
information about the “outside” and the learners during the learning. This
intimacy is decided and generated by nobody [10] but the learners themselves

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through their senses serving as “filters through which later perception
must pass” [10]. These filters were formed during the earlier learning during
the formative stages as the first step of socialization process and can beattenuated, modified, and even refined by later experience[11] .
How the filters work, in turn, depends on how broadly their senses havebeen exposed to, and thereby tested, which will give them a more refinedfeel and intuition about what is more relevant and what is not during theinformation acquisition. This progression is, to put it another way, a process
of examining the credibility and reliability of the pre-existing knowledge.
All should precede to, or take place simultaneously with, deciding whether
to use the acquired information or leave it out, and if using it, i.e., deciding
what is relevant to what he or she is looking for.
That is how “critical thinking” works and should work. However, thiscritical thinking is on the decline among students as they are drowned in thesea of information and data as they are profusely produced and transferredby the increasing number of “others,” the majority of whom are distantstrangers to the users, their “clients.” The students find themselves under thegreat pressure of receiving and knowing everything out there, which may
make them receptive but basically as a working antenna. There seems notime for them to filter the acquired information through their own senses
and feels. Whatever the preceding knowledge they may have soon becomes
irrelevant. Leaving the filter process to the initial impressions without further
examination is an unavoidable consequence [12].
The “self ” of the learners is now simply a transition mode between
information about the outside and the tasks like homework, assignments or a
problem in need of a quick fix. Knowledge is just a footnote, an attachment
file, but not part of the body of the discourse sent out by the learners. Withless involvement of the self and more influence of the distant “others” in thelearning, the individuality and the potentials of the students stay untapped,
therefore the problem solving are less likely to be innovative.
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3 An Alternative
3.1 An Alternative: Learning by “Experiencing”
Learning and the self are inseparable. People learn, after all, to serve two
purposes: 1) to make sense of his/her being and living in the world; and/or
2) to make sense of the world from his/her standpoint. Therefore, learning
is not only the work of quickly accumulating and storing information like acomputer machine. It is also the process wherein that information is filtered,weighted, selected and combined, and turned into knowledge by his/her self.
That is, to allow the “self ” to experience that knowledge and its production
through his/her senses.
Experience, when it comes to learning, is usually used as a noun, rather
than a verb, to mean an actual encounter with things or people or phenomena
from which knowledge is supposed to be generated, as opposed to theknowledge gained through studying or being taught. This paper offers, asa basis for EBA, a different approach to examine the term “experience.”
That is, experience here is used as a verb to mean filtering information
through one’s senses, and only by that “experiencing” what information may
convey, either from the means of media or from direct encounters, what is
the learner’s “outside” can “come close to his/her body.” Thus a round ofknowledge production is completed and that knowledge, in turn, becomes
the beginning of a new round of knowledge production.
This “experiencing” through the senses -- seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting and touching -- allows the learners not only to be impressed, but also
to be surprised, to be stricken, and later to become curious about the world
they (re)capture through the information. This curiosity, in particular, would
prompt more questions, guiding the search for additional information. The
whole process would repeat with questions and redefined questions until asatisfactory answer (or even solution) emerges. The result of the process isthat the senses -- feels and intuitions -- become sharper, enabling the learners
to find and catch, not just anything, but things relevant to their research.

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The intimacy, between knowledge and the self, is as important as theknowledge itself. Once experienced, according to psychologist Eldon Tulvin,
the knowledge is stored in long-term “episodic memories” (remembering)
while knowledge, without being experienced yet, is considered “knowing,”and stored in “semantic memories,” the stage preceding to episodic[13] . In
sum, experiencing knowledge is an integral part of knowledge production,
whether it is acquired through direct and indirect encounters, well considered,well re-considered, well digested, applied and/or innovated.
3.2 The Alternative in Practice: “Supervised Practical Experience”
Some started doubting about the necessity for the physical presence of
higher educational institutions before the storming penetration of e-worldof Internet. “Look at the music industry. It's been completely overturned by
the Internet... Journalism is in the midst of the battle. And higher education
is probably next,” as put it by George Mason University economist andMarginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen [14]. From a more pragmatic pointof view, the accreditation -- the ability of the providers to offer recognizedcredit courses and bestow degrees and diplomas -- may well be the remaining
value for the educational institutions.
However, the higher education institutions can be very much alive in theinteractive relationship between the teachers and the students, given a certain
set of conditions. The teachers play the role of supervision of the students
by initially refining, upgrading and providing the existing knowledge andinstructions on how to make use of it; they also provide their “real-time”
feedbacks to students’ understanding of it and to the students’ corresponding
performance (in, say, scientific experiments). One cannot overemphasize
the point, here, that this feedback is a reciprocal process as the students
also witness the teachers adjust, refine, and/or modify their initial use of theknowledge in the face of the students’ making use of it. Students “experience”
the knowledge as they themselves make use of it, find the need to change
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or refine it while its initial provider, too, may go through a similar, if not
identical, change. Internet, on the other hand, can cater to various andspontaneous needs of the students based on the existing knowledge. Internet
alone does not or can’t help providing the kind of interactive instructions
that can shift, grow, and refine the needs of students which shift, grow andchange as they “experience” the knowledge.
One condition of critical importance for the higher educational
institutions to protect the interactive teacher-student relationship in the faceof the penetration of internet is that the teacher-student interaction is secured
outside the physical confine of the classroom. Only then can the interactive
instructions and feedbacks embrace practical experiences which have become“essential for graduate preparation” since the middle of last century [15] aswell as the “learning opportunities for enabling new professionals to thrive
within the rapidly changing higher education milieu” [16].
That experiences are not limited within the classroom boundary or eventhe campus boundary succinctly summarizes what underlies the “supervised
practical experience” or supervised practice. “With the guidance of a facultyor site supervisor, students are able to address real-world issues and develop
tacit knowledge -- the kind of practical wisdom that allows for seemingly
intuitive problem solving. In addition, supervised experience develops a
trajectory of increasingly complex thinking that will likely generalize to newsituation, such as those encountered in a first professional position” [17].
SFC (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) of Keio University, Japan is among
the first and few campuses in Japan putting this “supervised practice” into
practice when it launched the “project-based learning to develop expertise”
in the early 1990s. Students since their early years at the university can join
the “seminars,” which used to be called, aptly, the “workshops.” Throughthe workshop-like seminars, the students are expected to develop a research
project which they complete within the relative short period of a few
semesters or years. Everything is designed so that the students would go

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through the whole motion of finding a problem worthy of solution. Easier
said than done. However, the merit of this style of student training lies inwhat appears to be its parametric impact.
First, when the students choose to participate in the seminars of theirpreference, they really are taking the first step to think of their learning
process extending beyond the campus boundary as they are pushed, often
inadvertently, to think of “where” they can “experience” the knowledge
they are taught in the seminars and lecture courses. A concrete first step
may be initiated by the students themselves, when they, with a problem
clearly defined and a goal of collecting relevant data cleared in their minds,
begin to write up a proposal to win one of the few research grants available
on campus to finance their trip outside the campus boundary or even thenational boundary.
Even within the campus boundary, the students are exposed to diverse“worlds” represented in the seminars which often allow or encourage
graduate students to join and bring in various research (knowledge)
experiences and, more recently, the increasing number of foreign students
their somewhat unfamiliar (to the Japanese students) life experiences.
There is something else which works on the minds of the teachers and thestudents alike. In these seminars, where regular discussions are held often
more than once a week, the students are expected to be able to work with thefaculty members more as equal partners rather than as the mere receptorsof knowledge[18]. Under this pressure, the students are pushed to familiarize
themselves with real-life issues, and to “identify a problem and find asolution to it” rather than remaining as one who “just knows the answer to agiven question” [19]. Accordingly, they often push themselves to question how
to make theories serve practically the problem defining and solving.
One result is that they are more focused in their search for relevant
knowledge and also better at filtering it in order to make it more relevant,and therefore intimate, to their research. Another result, which is often
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unbeknownst even to the students themselves, is a subtle shift in theirthinking. The usual distinction between semesters and long-tern breaks
such as summer or spring break is reversed or disappeared: the work during
the semester, i.e., “within” the classroom boundary, is the preparatory step
toward the work “without” during either of the following two long-term
breaks. Here, students are crossing another boundary, the time-boundary of
the semester-semester break division.
The project-based learning helps make students more oriented, more
selective and at the same time more demanding on further knowledge. But
it is not without a room for improvement: the supervision by teachers ofstudents are still often limited within the boundary of seminar rooms. The
effectiveness may still largely depend on the chemistry of the teacher-student
mix. The residual impact of the obvious “authority” relationship between
them, too, cannot be taken too lightly.
Besides, the supervision in the form of feedbacks in response to thestudents’ findings from their fields may still run triple risks: 1) failure to
insure the quality of the fieldwork by students, 2) insufficient testing of
the validity of the findings by the students, and more importantly, and 3)
missing what the students may have missed. All these, combined together
or separately, play critical role in the problem-finding and solving. None ofthese problems alone, however, may be disastrous to the growth of students
and to the credibility of the institution, as long as the project-based learning
secures a feedback loop of its own where the teachers and the students alikecan run through the whole process in a refined version of finding a problem,
its parametric factors, and its solution.
From this perspective of securing a self-corrective loop, however, one
thing stands in its way: the loop is costly, time-wise and money-wise.
Furthermore, things you miss at a given time cannot be the same at any othertime; and the students cannot afford to return to their field anytime of theirown choosing. The only protection against this misfortune is the thorough34

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preparation in designing the entire research process. As uncovered thusly
by practicing the project-based training, the supervised practice, or thesupervision over the practice of the students in the field still has a long way
to go before becoming fail-safe.
3.3 EBA in the practice of the Experiencing Knowledge
A group of professors, led by Prof. Jun Murai, Prof. Keiko Okawa
and Prof. Shinnosuke Obi, at Keio University, being aware of the needof supervised practice for students, launched the EBA program in 2012,
under the auspices of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science andTechnology, Japan through the mega project of Re-inventing Japan for theacademic period 2012-2016 [20]. Together with other 6 institutions from 5
countries (as of 2012) in Asia [21], Keio created a “University consortiumfor Evidence Based Approach” to emerging policy issues in Asia. EBA
concentrated on the 3 specific areas: “Energy and Environment”, “Healthand Environment” and “Disaster and Security.” Member universities within
the Consortium worked together, jointly designed a course curriculum forstudents of the participating universities, both undergrads and graduates.
The uniqueness of the EBA program was the 3-dimensional training1) online training including cross-university online courses (Japanese andSpecialization Subjects) and online sessions (Open Seminars scheduledon monthly basis), 2) conventional, or traditional “classroom” training, bymaking use of the available courses that have content fitting the requirementof EBA program (EBA core courses), and 3) practical courses includinginternship programs and fieldwork programs (Figure 1).
The bold step that EBA advocated is the inclusion of “supervised
practice” through its intensive and extensive fieldwork programs (one of
the two legs of EBA practical courses). Within the 5-year period (20122016), EBA has organized and managed 42 fieldworks (including 10 rounds
of preliminary fieldworks in the first 2 years), of which 21 rounds were
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Figure 1 EBA Curriculumin ASEAN countries and 21 in Japan. The total of participants in EBA
fieldwork programs is 488, in which 261 are from ASEAN and 227 from
Keio University. No other programs have organized fieldwork programs ofthis scale within such a short period of time.
EBA fieldwork programs cover a great number of topics, too, within
the three areas “Energy and Environment”, “Health and Environment” and“Disaster and Security” (Figure 2). There are fieldworks repeated every
year like Minamata fieldwork, Fujiyoshida, Sanriku Fieldwork, Vietnam
Fieldwork, Philippines and the like.
The framework of EBA fieldwork arm can be schematically summarized
as follows (Figure 3):
EBA fieldwork programs are the result of the collaboration between
the member universities of EBA Consortium by relying on the establishedresearch fields of their respective faculty members. For each round offieldwork, up to 30 students, across disciplines, both Japanese and ASEAN

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Fieldworks in Japan (hosted by Keio)
Fieldworks in ASEAN (host university)
Sanriku: Disaster Management
Philippines: Water and Waste Management
Minamata: Public Health + Environment(UP)
Fujiyoshida: Environment
Malaysia: Marine Ecology (USM)
Tsuruoka: HealthIndonesia: Water Resource Management (ITB)
Big Data
Vietnam: Public Health and Risk Management
Energy Management(HUST + Keio)
IT FW: Data Analysis on ONLINE LEARNING Thailand: Big Data and Disaster Management(CU)
Malaysia: Transforming Malaysia Batik (UM)Malaysia: Tangkai Cermin Orang Asli Settlement,
Perak and Penang (USM)
Myanmar: Disaster Management and Cultural
Heritage Preservation (USCY)

Figure 2 EBA Fieldwork Programs (2012-2016)

Figure 3 EBA Fieldwork Framework

students, are recruited for the program. During the 10-day framework(including moving days), students are always accompanied by local
instructors and volunteers (assisting both in language and technical training),
constantly receiving close instructions and supervision when needed in orderfor them to make the best of their experience in the field.
The interactions between teachers and students are intensive, and are
more often than not like between “equal partners” as they can exchange
the interpretations of their “experiencing” of the same reality in the field.
Competing with each other regarding how they interpret what they observein the fieldwork is also likely and encouraged to take place, but it is done in
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a constructive and instructive fashion. This is where the idea of “learning by
experiencing” is best applied.
The students do not simply go to the field to have a new experience(noun); more importantly, they are given the opportunities to experience(verb) what they see and do through verbalizing their thoughts and throughexchanging them with their peers and instructors. Not only that, the students
can also “experience” the “studied” knowledge and information that they
have picked up and see if that knowledge still can hold and examine if that
information helps them capture the reality better. Or conversely, they see ifwhat they observe can enrich and/or refine implications of that knowledge
with the new things they gather in the field.
This experiencing as a way of learning shows that learning may be just thematter of enriching what the learners already have (the memory). However,it entails more since the whole process of enrichment consists of refining
the processing, the storing and also changing what is inside them. To borrowfrom William J. Clancey, an IT engineer, cognitive scientist, and philosopher
of a sort all in one:
Speaking must be seen not as bringing out what is already inside, but
as a way of changing what is inside. Speaking is not restating what
has already been posted subconsciously inside the brain, but is itself anactivity of representing. Our names for things and what they mean, ourtheories, and our conceptions develop in our behavior as we interact
with and perceive what we and others have previously said and done.
This causal interaction is different from the linear “describing what
I perceive” or “looking for what I conceive.” Instead, the processes oflooking, perceiving, understanding, and describing are arising together
and shaping each other [22].

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4 EBA for higher education: Witness Accounts
What EBA entails goes receiving and ref ining knowledge comingfrom outside. The students have an excellent opportunity to have better
understanding of the “self ” -- what they are, what they can do and what theywant to do. By experiencing themselves in a different (from their familiarlife) yet real context, the students do become more aware of themselves, tofind out more what they know, what they may have never thought of, what
they have taken for granted, and how they see things, among others. The
process helps them become “surprised, to be stricken, and later to become
curious about the world they (re)capture through their senses.” This, inreturn, plays an important step to bring out individual qualities of the citizens
to confront the needs for a higher stage of a nation’s development, as statedearlier. That experiencing and the self-reflection upon that “experiencing”
may be well illustrated in the three following accounts.
“My happiness. Whose happiness. Peaceful society. Vietnam Fieldwork
has given me the precious experience to reconsider things I just took it
for granted and think about things that I have never given a deep thought
about. Also, being exposed to things with my own eyes, hearing stories
from local people, I have felt I have found new values and nature to the
problem for the first time. For that reason, although I haven’t changed
the desire to become someone who can contribute to a Japan of peaceand abundance, I have come to respect and cherish the desire to set myfoot on a lot more places and help solve many intricate social problems.”
E. N., female, 22 years old, graduated from Faculty of Laws, Keio
University, member of Vietnam Fieldwork in 2016. She will soon work
for Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry“Joining Myanmar Fieldwork this time, for me, was to let myself be
exposed to the problem at the local with my own eyes rather than to
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find out what I can do regarding the problem. Although the illegal
resettlement and illegal shop as research topic were already decided forthe fieldwork, I kept wondering what actually is the problem regarding
the issues during the fieldwork. Especially, when I was researching on
the issue of child labor, looking at those kids who came to pagoda sites
to work during school breaks and can learn English at the same time,
it just occurred to me that, maybe to outside kids, this is also what theywant to do. At the moment, I felt the need to raise the problem in a
careful manner, and that should be based on the clues from visiting
the sites, not with the biased images about child labors.”
H. I., female, 3rd year student at Faculty of Environment andInformation, Keio University, member of Myanmar Fieldwork, 2017

“Through the fieldwork in August, I came to realize that I have neverquestioned the word “handicapped child.” What exactly is the problem
facing the local people? And what is the problem that I want to deal
with? Once I realized that, I became more curious about policies,
institutions, education and working environments, things that are
evolving around local people’s daily life. Also, not only at the field,
I started wanting to apply the concept I learned from the f ield toapproach things I see in my own daily life. I have become more curious
about more things like my hometown, my family, relatives.”
M. N., female, graduated from Faculty of Policy and Management,
Keio University, regular member of Vietnam Fieldwork 2015-2017. She
will work soon for Nippon Foundation- Japan

Broadening students’ perspectives approaching reality, ref ining
meanings in conventionally and casually used concepts like the “child labor,”or the “handicapped,” and boosting up the desire to link that reality in thefield to the daily life, future work is already in the making in these students’40Evidence Based Approach (EBA)

minds. It is the opportunity for them to think clearly about the need to define
the problem, to understand clearly what they can do before they can start
thinking of solving the problem. Professor Michio Umegaki (retired, Professor
in Political Science at Faculty of Policy and Management, instructor for
Vietnam Fieldwork), impressed with the products (poster session and otherforms of the final presentations by the fieldwork participants, confessed: “A
10-day work in the fieldwork may be more productive than a couple of 15week lecture courses for the students.”
In addition, the EBA supervised practice is beneficial to the teachers.
Their positioning differs greatly from what they are in the classroom. The
teachers-students distance created by the authority of the teachers in theclassroom is reduced, opening more opportunities for interactions between
them. Teachers are not the authority medium for “knowledge transferring,”
but the partners in “sharing” interpretations now that they are standing before
the same field, given the same materials for their mental activities. Teachers’interpretations, thought instructive, can be competed or supplemented withthat from the students. By so doing, teachers can also be the beneficiary inthis interactive environment.
The concept behind EBA (Evidence Based Approach) is similar to
the model of “situated learning,” in which learning is a social process
and not solely in the learner’s head. It is rather than “the acquisition of
propositional knowledge” but situated in “social engagements providing theproper context for learning to take place”- a process Lave and Wenger calllegitimate peripheral participation[23].

This learning entails “negotiation

and renegotiation of meaning in the world. This implies understanding andexperience are constant interaction-indeed, are mutually constitutive…
thus dissolving dichotomies between cerebral and embodied activity,
between contemplation and involvement, between abstract and experience:
persons, and the world are implicated in all though, speech, knowing, andlearning” [24].
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5 Conclusions
During the 5-year period, EBA program experienced a number oftrials and errors, some of which stemmed from the inevitable difficulties
accompanying the ambitious program, especially its “fieldwork” arm. These
include: the funding for the activities in the field, as it involves a great dealof physical movements for all participants from one place to another. Partof its accompanying costs were burdened by MEXT but the financing thefieldwork should be considered among the top priority for a future expansionof the program. The physical movements by the participants also betray
another problem: differences in the academic calendars of the participating
institutions. Fine tuning of the timings of f ieldwork would have to becarefully prepared. Apart from these, we also witnessed the discrepancy
between the architects of fieldwork and the local personnel arranging andsupporting the activities, which turned the fieldwork not much more than astudy “tour.”None of these is insurmountable if a future EBA prepares thoroughly theabove-mentioned three-dimensional training. Not only that, the preparation
should be promoted with EBA’s expansion to more educational institutions in
mind.

Notes
[1] Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU), http://www.aacu.org/press/
press-releases/2015employerstudentsurveys, retrieved 2017, September 30.
[2] John Dewey, Democracy and Education- An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education,
1916.
[3] Steven M. Janosik, et al., Learning through Supervised Practice in Student Affairs, (2nd
Edition), Routledge, 2015.
[4] Oxford Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/learning, retrieved 2017
October 1st.
[5] Chad Brooks, The Internet of Things: A seamless network of everyday objects, fromwww.livescience.com, retrieved at https://www.livescience.com/38562-internet-of-things.
html, 2017 October 2nd.
[6] The Statistic Portal Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-

42Evidence Based Approach (EBA)
connected-devices-worldwide/ retrieved on 2017, October 2 nd.
[7] Chad Brooks, The Internet of Things: A seamless network of everyday objects, fromwww.livescience.com, retrieved at https://www.livescience.com/38562-internet-of-things.
html, 2017 October 2 nd.
[8] Betsy Sparrow, et. al, Science Magazine, Vol. 333, Issue 6043 (2011, August 05), Google
Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequence of Having Information at our Fingertips,
retrieved at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.full on September 30.
[9] I am not here to walk into a vast area of sociology of knowledge. The distinction I makebetween information and knowledge is based upon my own research experiences invarious parts of Southeast Asia and Japan, including central Vietnam, Java, Indonesia,
and Susono, Japan. Here, for the sake of convenience, I see knowledge as a set of
selected and weighted information, an end product of a series of action process offinding (or rediscovering) a problem and its parameters, and finding a solution to it andthe solution’s beneficiaries. I have benefited, though, from a pioneering work of “thegrounded theorists” such as Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, Awareness of
Dying, Aldine Publishing, 1965, a work of narrative analysis through thorough in-depth
interviews and close observations of a ward for terminal cancer and other ailments.
[10] James A. Bill, Robert L Hardgrave, Jr, Comparative Politics- The Quest for Theory,
University Press of America, 1981, p.107.
[11] ibid.
[12] Resilience of one’s critical thinking may be proportionate to how often or how broadly
he or she is closely exposed to things or people that challenge what he or she has taken
for granted. By the same token, one who is deprived of such exposure is deprived also of
the key ingredient of critical thinking. On this point. I made a liberal use of how “self ”
is shaped and reshaped in a dynamic, and social, interactions with others as developed bya social psychologist, Earvin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959),
Overlook Press, 1973.
[13] Tulving, E. (1972), “Episodic and semantic memory” In E. Tulving and W. Donaldson(Eds.), Organization of Memory (pp. 381- 402). New York: Academic Press. Tulving
coined the terms episodic memory to make a distinction with semantic memory in whichknowing (semantic) is more factual whereas remembering (episodic) is a feeling that is
located in the past.
[14] The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/tyler-coweneverywhere-will-be-like-the-music-industry/259344/, retrieved in 2017 October 2nd.
[15] Steven M. Janosik, et al., Learning through Supervised Practice in Student Affairs, (2nd
Edition), Routledge, 2015, p.6.
[16] ibid., p. 4.
[17] ibid.
[18] Keio University, Shonan Fujisawa Campus Page, https://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/en/pmei/
seminars.html.
[19] ibid.
[20] Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan (MEXT): Reinventing Japan Project is a funding project, promoting inter-university exchanges
between Japanese universities and other universities in Asia countries and the US to“foster human resources capable of being globally active, and to assure the quality ofmechanisms for the mutual recognition of credits and grade management through aninternational framework”, http://www.mext.go.jp/en/policy/education/highered/title02/

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43

EBA

detail02/sdetail02/1373893.htm.
[21] Keio University (Japan); University of the Philippines Diliman (Philippines); Universityof Science, Malaysia (Malaysia); University of Malaya (Malaysia); Chulalongkorn
University (Thailand); Institute of Technology Bangdung (Indonesia); and Hanoi
University of Science and Technology (Vietnam.). Later on, Brawijaya University
Indonesia) and University of Computer Studies, Yangon (Myanmar) joined in someselected activities.
[22] William J. Clancey, Situated Cognition on Human Knowledge and Computer
Representations, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.3.
[23] Jane Lave, Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning - Legitimate Peripheral Participation,
Cambridge University Press, 1991, p.14.
[24] ibid., pp.51-52.

References
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Bill, James A. and Robert L Hardgrave, Jr., Comparative Politics - The Quest for Theory,
University Press of America, 1981.
Brooks, Chad, The Internet of Things: A seamless network of everyday objects, fromwww.livescience.com, retrieved at https://www.livescience.com/38562-internet-ofthings.html, 2017 October 2nd.
Clancey, William J., Situated Cognition on H uman K nowled ge and Com puter
Representations, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Dewey, John, Democracy and Education - An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education, 1916.
Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm L. Strauss, Awareness of Dying, Aldine Publishing, 1965.
Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (1959) Overlook Press, 1973.
Janosik, Steven M. et al., Learning through Supervised Practice in Student Affairs, (2nd
Edition), Routledge, 2015.
Keio University, Shonan Fujisawa Campus Page, https://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/en/pmei/
seminars.html.
Lave, Jane and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning- Legitimate Peripheral Participation,
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan(MEXT), http://
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Sparrow, Betsy et. al, Science Magazine, Vol. 333, Issue 6043 (2011, August 05), Google
Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequence of Having Information at our Fingertips,
retrieved at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.full on September
30.
The Statistic Portal Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-

44Evidence Based Approach (EBA)
connected-devices-worldwide/ retrieved on 2017, October 2nd.
Tulving, Eldon, “Episodic and semantic memory,” in E. Tulving and W. Donaldson (Eds.),
Organization of Memory, New York: Academic Press, 1972, pp. 381-402.

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