Inaugural posting in which I introduce the genesis of the term Instructional Kaizen

What is kaizen?
Economic geographers from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, along with many other social scientists interested in really-existing capitalism, examined the workings of the then-ascendant Japanese economy. At the time, Post-war Japan's economic might flowed from its substantial manufacturing base. One of the key institutional features of Japanese manufacturing systems was an internalized routine of continuous product and process upgrading, often called kaizen. Because this feature was alleged to be the norm in Japanese manufacturing culture, perhaps it is more clear to say it is a culturally-specific commonsensical understanding of how work flows on the shopfloor. Kaizen suggests a constant tinkering and monitoring and revising of a production process or workflow in an effort to always make it that much better.

Why not Tüftler?
In the German-language industrial restructuring and economic geography literature, there was also reference to the Tüftler, which calls up images of the inventor toiling away in the garage or shop, trying to perfect the proverbial widget, or the process for making it. However, Tüftler never achieved widespread use in the English-language literature (I only learned the term while conducting fieldwork in 2000-2002 on the locational dynamics of the German book trade, a decade after I'd already been exposed to the ideas of kaizen, just-in-time production, flexible production, flexible accumulation and post-Fordism). Furthermore, my understanding of the useage of Tüftler doesn't suggest a widespread, collectively held mindset or disposition about how work is done, which is how kaizen is usually described. Instead, Tüftler refers to individuals who operate on their own. While these Tüftler are not unknown, their mindset was not described as ubiquitously held in German manufacturing in the way that the kaizen principle was alleged to be among Japanese workers.

The term Kaizen captures this principle in a single word.

Instructional Kaizen
I see my own teaching practice informed by this principle of kaizen, which leads me to coin the term 'instructional kaizen' both as shorthand and to recall the literature where I first encountered this principle of constant monitoring and improvement. While the evidence-based pedagogical literature doesn't use the term Instructional Kaizen, its findings (and the rigorous process through which the findings are derived) are consistent with a kaizen mindset.

Why Instructional Kaizen and not TüftlerInnenfest?
Instructional Kaizen suggests that there is a community of other instructors who embrace this mindset and possess this disposition, and share their successes, failures and practices to create a commonwealth of instructional knowledge. The image of Der Tüftler or Die Tüftlerin always conjured up a proprietary and guarded (if not downright secretive) lone wolf whose connection to a larger community of work was linked not through collaboration and sharing, but through reverse-engineering. Finally, I am not longer sure where I would stand with the Rechtschreibungsreformen if I made the lovely compound noun, BildingstüftlerInnenfest, which would translate as 'the festival of instructional tinkerers (of both sexes).'

More breadcrumbs
My YouTube account is ProfBoggs, and my long-standing webpage is www.jeffboggs.com . I work here and am affiliated with this.