The 5th African Education Research Forum in 2010 at GSID.

Hi, all. This is Kyohei.
Firstly, I would like to say to all of M1 students “Welcome to GSID".It’s a great pleasure to meet all of you. I hope your GSID life will be filled with a number of precious experiences and great memories with your friends, senpai and professors. We, all M2 students, are excited about chatting with you and are also willing to give the fullest support to you.

By the way, let me talk about the African Education Research Forum (AERF) held at GSID in 16th and 17th of April, which is just a couple of days ago. AERF, started in 2008 as a semi-formal educational congress, has been held twice a year participated by students and faculty members, whose academic interest is education in Africa. This was the 5th time, and a little less than 50 participants mainly from Nagoya University, Hiroshima University, Kobe University, Naruto University of Education, Osaka University and Waseda University attended the forum.

The forum is student-centered, so more than half of those who make a presentation are students. This time, 18 out of 26 presenters were students. It was actually really interesting and informative to hear the presentations of other school students and professors, especially because there were too many contents that I had not known before.

Overall, the forum was quite successful not only because GSID people fulfilled a great role in organizing this big forum as a host school, but also because it seems that among all the participants, there were a deep discussion and significant perspective sharing based on their own knowledge and experiences. Personally speaking, I learnt many things from other graduate school students and professors, and also it was so much fun to talk with them. I hope this kind of forum will be increased and developed more extensively in the future.

Kyohei Takeuchi