Sigtuna Foundation

In the autumn of 2022, with a research grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, we organized a symposium in Nagoya, Japan with Swedish and Japanese early education specialists.This collaboration was based on previous work that investigated ESD, aesthetic, and multicultural curriculum in Sweden and Japan (Morrone, Matsuyama, 2019 et al).This 2022 seminar week was created to provide an opportunity to have Swedish educators experience Japanese school curriculum, see the issues facing Japanese education today, and express their opinions and queries.The Swedish reactions to what they experienced in Japanese school observations tell much about what values Swedish society and culture aims to instill in the developing child.Similarly, the Japanese opinions of Swedish education observed shines a light on what are considered important goals for Japanese education.Additionally, our symposium invitees were given cultural tours prior to their school visits in order to gain some visceral insight into the historical and cultural environment that influences what school is in a particular society.In this way, the symposium provides a place and time to see the sort of educational realities both countries face, get a sense of how each society prepares the next generation of teachers, and motivates educators to imagine what challenges must be met.At the end of the week, both Japanese and Swedish educators saw similarities regarding changing demographics; all felt the need to create a platform for continued professional education for teachers, experts, and potentially, pre-service teachers.The following is a discussion of points of change and aspects of curricular development highlighted by the symposium.

Lindbom-Jakobson M, Lindgren L. The Framework of Psychoanalytically Oriented Psychotherapy with Traumatised Patients and the Institution. Int Forum Psychoanal 1997;6:217-224. ISSN 0803-706X. Psychotherapies performed at multidisciplinary institutions will be influenced by the ongoing dynamics and inevitable group processes of the institution. The difficulties of these processes become extremely hard to handle when the patient category is a severely traumatised one. The prerequisite of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, the illusion of the sealed room and fixed framework, gets disturbed by the information flow in an institution. The institutions for these patients tend to become stages on which the patients as well as staff can perform and repeat their intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts, non-adaptive defences and disturbed object relations. The predominant dynamic that arises around tortured refugees as a patient category is sado-masochistic relating.