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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 paper uses examples from research conducted in preschools in Japan, China, and the United States to illustrate the features and virtues of return interviews with informants with whom ethnographers have long research engagements. Return interviews and long research engagements are powerful research strategies that help the ethnographers ask more insightful questions and make more sense of informants’ replies, informants better understand the researchers and their agenda, and the research to achieve a more diachronic perspective.

This paper briefly reviews theories of embodiment and then provides an example from our recent work on how we use video in our comparative studies of preschools to highlight embodied and implicit cultural pedagogies. The example we present focuses on how Japanese preschool teachers use the Japanese cultural practice of mimamoru (teaching by watching and waiting) as an embodied technique that combines gaze, location, posture, and touch. We demonstrate how a microanalysis of video footage, when used in conjunction with ethnographic interviews, can draw attention to culturally patterned embodied practices that may otherwise be difficult to perceive.

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.

This article presents a reanalysis of a scene we early filmed and edited in a Japanese preschool classroom. We use a variety of visual and narrative strategies to reframe the video, shifting attention from those we had in earlier editing and analyses decided were peripheral to the action. The article uses this example to address larger questions about who in an ethnographic film are considered to be the key protagonists deemed worthy of representation and of other culture-bound assumptions in visual storytelling.

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.

THE TYPICALITY OF NEIGHBORHOODS studied by anthropologists is a key methodological issue for those who deal with complex, differentiated urban systems. This article describes a video-stimulated, multivocal solution to the problem of ethnographic field-site typicality. As an example of this approach, the article reveals how the reactions of audiences in six Japanese cities to a video ethnography of a day in a Kyoto preschool worked to produce awareness of regional, class, and ideological differences in Japanese society, [ethnography, videotape, Japan, preschool]

What if I were to tell you of a bold experiment in anthropological writing in which ethnographies are chopped up and then jumbled together so that from page to page even the typefaces change (like thirtysomething). Page 93 from a French physical anthropologist's 1899 study of cranial dimensions of natives of the Toba tribal group follows page 51 from a 1968 study of Toban religious beliefs by a Mennonite missionary/anthropologist, which follows page 12 of an American culture and personality theorist's 1974 paper on children's doll play among the Toba. A series of numbers and dots running down the margins gives you the option of sequencing your reading in a variety of ways, including the usual beginning to end. Would it matter if I told you that the idea for this radical text was developed not in 1987 by a Nobel-prize winning Argentinian novelist, but instead in 1937 by an American behavioral scientist searching for a unified theory of human behavior?

Polyvocal approaches allow researchers and informants to interact on a more equal footing and informants’ voices to be heard in the final text. But research methods intended to empower informants also can be a source of unanticipated authorial power ‐ the power to confront informants with unsolicited self‐reflections and to textualize people's lives and words. The authors reflect on those ethical dilemmas in this article.

Several years ago my colleagues [1] and I were struggling to find an appropriate approach for studying Japanese, Chinese, and United States preschools when we attended a screening of a pair of ethnographic films by Tim Asch, Linda Conner, and Patsy Asch [2]. In the first film, A Balinese Trance Seance, a medium enters a trance state in order to help a grieving family contact their dead son. The second film, Jew on Jero: A Balinese Seance Observed, shows Jero watching A Balinese Trance for the first time. While Jero watches herself on film the