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Children Crossing Borders was an ambitious study of the intersection of im/migration and early childhood education in five countries: England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. This ar...

Children Crossing Borders is a comparative study o f how early childhood education and care programs in England, France, German y, Italy, and the US are approaching the task of working with children of recent immigrants and of areas of agreement and disagreement in beliefs about what sh ould happen in preschool of recent immigrant parents of young children and their children's teachers. The method used in the study is a version of video-cued ethnographic interviewing, in which preschool parents and practitioners were shown 20-minute videos of days in preschools in their own and other countries and asked for thei r reactions and evaluations. This paper focuses on how immigrant parents and preschoo l practitioners talk about the ideal balance of academic preparation and play in the curriculum. A keynding is that immigrant parents tend to favor greater emphasi s on academic instruction than do their children's teachers, except in France, where teachers as well as parents see preschool as a place for academics rather than for play. Our analysis suggests that reasons for immigrant parents' preference for a greater academic emphasis include past experience with education in their host countr y; pragmatic concerns about their children's vulnerability to failing in school; and i deological beliefs about curriculum and pedagogy that are tied to a larger social conservatism as well as to social class.

This is an ethnographic study of how two Japanese kindergartens are implementing the yōhoichigenka policy aimed at reforming the Japanese early childhood education system. The cases of these two kindergartens demonstrate what happens when a top-down mandate reaches the level of individual programs. The programs creatively find ways of responding to the reform mandate and to social change while maintaining what their administrators view as their pedagogical traditions. This paper also argues for the value of ethnographic methods to show how local programs are creative, resistant, and pragmatic in how they deal with top down pressures and directives.

Meisei Gakuen, a private school for the deaf in Tokyo, is the only school for the deaf in Japan that uses Japanese Sign Language (JSL) as the primary language of instruction and social interaction. We see Meisei as a useful case for bringing out core issues in Japanese deaf and early childhood education, as well as for making larger arguments about the contribution of what we call “implicit pedagogical practices.” In this article, we make Meisei the pivot point for two comparisons: (a) between the Meisei deaf preschool program and the programs of “regular” (nondeaf) preschools and (b) between Meisei’s JSL approach and the “total communication” approach used by the public deaf preschools. The implicit pedagogical practice we track across the three types of Japanese preschool settings is mimamoru, a hesitancy of teachers to intervene in children’s disputes and other social interactions.

Background/Context Many scholars in the fields of teacher education, multicultural education, and bilingual education have argued that children of recent immigrants are best served in classrooms that have teachers who understand the cultural background and the home language of their students. Culturally knowledgeable and responsive teachers are important in early education and care settings that serve children from immigrant families. However, there is little research on immigrant teachers’ cultural and professional knowledge or on their political access to curricular/pedagogical decision-making. Focus of Study This study is part of the larger Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study: a comparative study of what practitioners and parents who are recent immigrants in multiple countries think should happen in early education settings. Here, we present an analysis of the teacher interviews that our team conducted in the United States and compare the perspectives of immigrant teachers with those of their nonimmigrant counterparts, specifically centering on the cultural expertise of immigrant teachers who work within their own immigrant community. Research Design The research method used in the CCB project is a variation of the multi-vocal ethnographic research method used in the two Preschool in Three Cultures studies. We made videotapes of typical days in classrooms for 4-year-olds in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings in five countries (England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States) and then used these videos as cues for focus group interviews with parents and teachers. Using a coding framework designed by the national CCB team, we coded 30 focus group interviews. The coding framework was designed to facilitate comparisons across countries, cities, and categories of participants (teachers and parents, immigrant and nonimmigrant). Findings/Results Teachers who are themselves immigrants from the same communities of the children and families they serve seem perfectly positioned to bridge the cultural and linguistic worlds of home and school. However, our study of teachers in five U.S. cities at a number of early childhood settings suggests that teachers who are themselves immigrants often experience a dilemma that prevents them from applying their full expertise to the education and care of children of recent immigrants. Rather than feeling empowered by their bicultural, bilingual knowledge and their connection to multiple communities, many immigrant teachers instead report that they often feel stuck between their pedagogical training and their cultural knowledge. Conclusions/Recommendations Bicultural, bilingual staff, and especially staff members who are themselves immigrants from the community served by the school, can play an invaluable role in parent–staff dialogues, but only if their knowledge is valued, enacted, and encouraged as an extension of their professional role as early childhood educators. For the teachers, classrooms, and structures in our study, this would require nonimmigrant practitioners to have a willingness to consider other cultural versions of early childhood pedagogy as having merit and to enter into dialogue with immigrant teachers and immigrant communities.

I use examples from my ethnographic work on early childhood education and care settings in Japan and France to demonstrate that quality standards are cultural constructs and to question the universality of such core U.S. standards of quality in ECEC as low student-teacher ratios and multicultural curricula. My argument is that quality standards should reflect local values and concerns and not be imposed across cultural divides. In a heterogeneous society such as the U.S., notions of quality should arise out of conversations in local communities among early childhood educators and parents.

To study changing beliefs about early childhood education, educators in Beijing were asked to discuss a 20-minute video of a typical day in a Beijing preschool. This paper focuses on reactions to a segment in the video where a teacher, Ms Chang, speaks harshly to a four-year-old girl who cries throughout breakfast. The preservice educators who commented on the videotapeon the whole were unsurprised by and supportive of Ms Chang’s approach to dealing with a crying child. In contrast, the inservice teachers expressed surprise and indignation. The experts (professors and graduate students in early childhood education) were also generally critical, but they saw Ms Chang’s approach as symptomatic of an emphasis on control that remains common even in an era that emphasizes respect for children, creativityand freedom. These disparate reactions expose the tensions and contradictions facing Chinese early childhood educators as they struggle to maintain cultural values while preparing children to compete in the global capitalist economy.

The body is disappearing in early childhood education. Once a protected site within the larger world of education in which the body could flourish, preschools are now a battle-zone in the war against the body, sites where the bodies of children and the adults who care for them fall under increasing scrutiny and discipline. The decline of the body in early childhood education takes many forms: compared to a generation ago, young children are spending less time in the sandbox and more at the computer; they are less likely to sit on their teachers’ lap or to be given a hug, to finger-paint, dance, or run naked through a sprinkler, or to engage with their peers in physical interaction of either the affectionate or rough-housing varieties.

If there is a universal truth, a universal good, as far as American preschool teachers, parents, and scholars are concerned, it is, The smaller the class size and the smaller the student/teacher ratio, the better. Advisory groups in the United States push state regulatory agencies to lower student/ teacher ratios for 4-year-olds, from 18:1 to 14:1. American parents shopping for a program for their 3-year-olds are likely to begin their questioning of a preschool director by asking, How many children do you have in each class? If they can afford it, these parents are likely to select a school with a ratio of eight children per teacher over a school with a ratio of 12:1. American early childhood education specialists stress the importance of small classes, small student/teacher ratios, and a high degree of contact between students and their teachers.' This clear American preference for small classes can be seen, for example, in Belsky's recent review of daycare research: "When group size is large and ratios are poor, individual attention to children falls victim to the exigencies of coping with an overextended set of resources. Either restrictions and controlling behavior increase, or disregard and aimless behavior on the part of the child increases. Neither is in the child's best interest" (emphasis added).2 What, then, are we to make of the Japanese preschool's typical ratios of 30 students per teacher and per class for 4and 5-year-olds? Japan is a wealthy country, a country that gives great importance to education, a country whose students from first grade on outperform Americans (and, indeed, most of the rest of the world) on international academic achievement tests." Yet, Japanese schools function with class sizes and student/teacher ratios that far exceed American prescribed limits on students per teacher and that are wildly out of line with what most American experts on preschool education believe to be ideal. Mombusho, the Japanese Ministry