Providing a Liberal Arts Peace Studies Course in English at a Japanese University

The purpose of this paper is to describe a Peace Studies course in Liberal Arts education taught and learned in English at a Japanese university and also to examine the results of students’ course evaluation. An increasing number of universities all over the world provide courses in which students can get credits and complete their degrees by only taking the subjects taught in English. At Hiroshima University, all the first-year students take a peace studies course as one of their compulsory subjects. The university needs to provide some of those courses in English for international students and those Japanese students who are interested in studying abroad. “Global Issues Towards Peace B” is one of those subjects. The course was conducted in English by a Japanese English teacher (the author) and 11 students took it in 2017. They met eight times for the course in the second term and they learned various important global issues to create a more peaceful and better world. Every week they had a group discussion of four people, and several appointed students prepared and gave their presentations with Power Point slides. At the end of the course, the students worked on the course evaluation questionnaire and wrote some comments on the course. It has been found that almost all of them were very satisfied with the course. Two major reasons were that it was conducted in English, and that the pedagogic tasks were stimulating