Consideration of Desirable Function and Feature of CBPR Center in Local University in Japan

Following the turning of Japanese national universities into independent administrative entities in 2004 and the submission of a report by the Central Council for Education in 2005, national universities are strengthening their activities aimed at contributing to society and regional communities. “Regional revitalization” policies recently laid out by the national government refer to regional national universities as one of the key elements, and the request for their contribution has been increasing in society. For regional national universities, the activities to contribute to society and regional communities are important not only to meet the requests from society and also to maintain and improve their presence in their respective regions.

  Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of higher education administration, based on the policy to promote “university reform” described in the third mid-term goals and mid-term plans for national universities, regional national universities are strongly urged to implement activities utilizing their strengths.

  Against this background, regional national universities are advancing various activities for social and regional contribution or for research targeting their respective regions. However, these activities are facing various problems, such as an increase in the workload of the personnel handling individual issues and also of some teachers. In addition, there is a mismatch between the activities and the performance evaluation and research results of the researchers. For this reason, the activities are not fully understood in the community of researchers and do not receive active participation. In view of this situation, systematic efforts aligned with the contents of the research activities of the researchers are required, in order to advance these activities on a continuous basis.

  With the background and recognition described above, the Working Group for Establishment of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Center has been set up for the purpose of advancing activities of Tottori University to contribute both to society and regional communities after the COC (“Center Of Community”: on-going national program) and related researches based on the activities, and proposing a framework that will benefit both regional communities and researchers’ community.

  We are considering the function and feature of CBPR center. Specifically, we are conceptualizing that using the prototyping process to detect and solve the regional problems. We will report the detail of concept in this poster.