The publisher
One person
kyōshi is a sole trader. That is not a modest way of saying "small team". It means there is one person: Dr Matt McLain, who reads the submissions, argues in the margins, signs the contracts, checks the proofs, and answers this email address.
There is a reason to say so plainly. A publishing house of one cannot hide behind a committee, and cannot blame an acquisitions board for a book it should have published and didn't. Every decision here has a name on it. That is the risk of the arrangement, and the whole point of it.
Who he is
Matt McLain is/was a teacher who became a teacher of teachers, and then a researcher of how teaching is done.
He taught design and technology (D&T) for over a decade in secondary schools in the North West of England — systems and control, electronics, the parts of the subject where things either work or they don't — and became an Advanced Skills Teacher. In 2009 he moved into initial teacher education at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and leads the secondary teacher education programmes. He has spent seventeen years in the business of standing next to someone while they learn to do a difficult thing, and then getting out of the way.
His doctorate, awarded by published work, is on the 'demonstration' in design and technology (D&T) education — the moment a practitioner shows another person how, and what is really being transmitted when they do. It is, on reflection, the same question a book asks.
He co-edited The Bloomsbury Handbook of Technology Education, gathering thirty chapters from contributors across five continents. He is a Trustee of the Design and Technology Association. He has advised the Department for Education on the drafting of the National Curriculum and on subject criteria for GCSE and A level. He chaired the fortieth Pupils' Attitudes Towards Technology international research conference, held in Liverpool in 2023, and has represented D&T education in the UK at the UNESCO Chair for Technology and Engineering Education. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and of the Royal Society of Arts.
His research interests run to pedagogy and didactics, curriculum design, subject knowledge, the philosophy of technology, and the methods — Q methodology among them — that let you take seriously what practitioners actually think.
Why a publishing house
Because there is a category of book that the trade will not commission and the academy will not reward: the one written by a practitioner who has learned something real, for other practitioners, at a price a teacher can pay.
Academic publishing prices those books out of the hands of the people they were written for. Trade publishing wants them broader, or shorter, or by someone more famous. Neither is a villain; both are answering to pressures kyōshi does not have. A sole trader with no shareholders and no list quota can publish a book because it ought to exist, and can keep it in print for as long as it is useful.
The name — 教師, kyōshi, teacher — is not decoration. It is a description of the job.
Working with him
If you have a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you cannot get anyone else to take seriously, write. You will get a reply from the person who makes the decision, and if the answer is no you will be told why.
The practical bit
kyōshi is a trading name of Matt McLain, sole trader.