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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.

Guangbo ticao (group exercise) is a daily routine in Chinese preschools characterized by collectivity, discipline, and conformity. In this article we explore the question of why guangbo ticao has survived in an era of progressive educational reform in contemporary China. We use interviews with Chinese preschool teachers and children to argue that guangbo ticao is an implicit embodied practice that carries traditional Chinese cultural, ethical, and aesthetic beliefs, produces distinct meanings and pleasures, and meets important social needs.

This article examines Japanese teachers' beliefs about children's peripheral participation in emotional interactions in the classroom, and especially in fights. The article is based on a reanalysis of scenes of fighting in Japanese preschools from Tobin and colleagues' 2009 book and video, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited. The reanalysis shifts the focus of attention from the protagonists in the fights, who occupy the center of the video frames, to the children on the margins. Japanese teachers have an emic cultural vocabulary for conceptualizing such peripheral participation, including the terms gyarari (gallery), gaiya (outfielders), seken (the generalized audience), and mawari no ko (the children around). Our analysis suggests that Japanese preschool teachers believe that in responding to children's fights their goal should be to give not only the protagonists but the class as a whole opportunities to experience emotions and to cultivate a sense of collective responsibility for events in their classroom community.

Among the lessons to be learned in Japanese preschool is how to experience, present, and respond to feelings. We suggest that the feeling most emphasized in Japanese preschools is sabishiisa (loneliness). Japanese preschool educators draw attention to feelings of sabishiisa, or loneliness, to promote a desire in young children for social connection. This social connection is built on a foundation of amae (expressions of dependency needs) and omoiyari (responding empathically to expressions of amae). Using examples from everyday life in a Japanese preschool, we argue that the Japanese preschool's pedagogy of feeling emphasizes learning to respond empathetically to loneliness and other expressions of need. Our analysis suggests that sabishiisa, amae, and omoiyari (loneliness, dependence, and empathy) form a triad of emotional exchange, which, although not unique to Japan or to the Japanese preschool, have a particular cultural patterning and salience in Japan and in the Japanese approach to the socialization of emotions in early childhood. [emotion, feeling, Japan, preschool, amae]

In this article, the authors present multiple interpretations of a transcript of a discussion with a group of Turkish-German girls in a kindergarten in Berlin, Germany. These five-year-old girls make statements suggesting they experience alienation from their non-Turkish classmates and teachers, and the wider German society. The authors argue that the meanings of these statements should not be taken at face value. Instead, they employ interpretive strategies borrowed mostly from Mikhail Bakhtin and interpretive frameworks taken from Judith Butler, and post-colonial theory and Critical Race Theory to suggest that the girls' utterances can be usefully seen as having a performative dimension and as expressing tensions around immigration that can be found in the larger society.

In the USA there is a contemporary discourse of crisis about the state of education and a parallel discourse that lays a large portion of the blame onto the poor quality of educational research. The solution offered is ‘scientific research’. This article presents critiques of the core assumptions of the scientific research as secure argument. These assumptions include: a misleading metaphorical conflation of education and medicine; an equating of ‘scientific’ with ‘empirical’ or ‘rigorous’; a linear understanding of the relationship of research to practice; a parochialism that ignores research from other countries; a confusion of research quality with utility; and a naive belief in progress—‘better living (and learning) through science’. Ironically, science‐based practice is put forth as the solution to what ails education in the USA in the absence of scientific evidence that such an approach to educational reform is effective.

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 metaphor of scaling up is the wrong one to use for describing and prescribing educational change. Many of the strategies being employed to achieve scaling up are counter‐productive: they conceive of practitioners as delivery agents or consumers, rather than as co‐constructors of change. An approach to educational innovation based on the concept of taking local innovations to scale carries the danger of turning schools into franchises and of reducing the global diversity of educational ideas. Sound educational ideas get scaled up not only (or primarily) through a linear, top‐down model that begins with a laboratory test and ends with a road show of workshops and training sessions. They also get scaled up—in the sense of disseminated and then adapted in ways that change practice—through researchers sharing with practitioners thickly described, contextualized examples of innovative practices and then inviting practitioners to decide how best to adapt these innovative practices for their local settings.

In this article the reflections of the teachers and directors of Komatsudani Hoikuen (‘day-care center’) on a video the authors recently made at their preschool are used to explore processes of continuity and change in Japanese preschool education over the course of a generation. The social changes that are associated with changing preschool practices in Japan include: a falling birth rate, women's changing attitudes about marriage and work, the social isolation of families, a putative decline in the quality of parenting, and a prevailing mood of national pessimism that is closely tied to a long period of economic decline. These factors are discussed in relation to Komatsudani's minimalist approach to curriculum, to its strategy for dealing with children's disputes, and to its development of a system of older children helping with the care of infants and toddlers.

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.

By placing familiar American early childhood educational practices such as sharing time and process writing alongside unfamiliar approaches used in Japan, this article attempts to deconstruct the pedagogy of self-expression. The article argues that the pedagogy of self-expression is (1) conceptually confused and internally inconsistent, (2) insensitive to class and cultural differences within American society, and (3) a symptom of the malady of postmodern emptiness.

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?

Initially developed in Japan by Nintendo as a computer game, Pokemon swept the globe in the late 1990s. Based on a narrative in which a group of children capture, train, and do battle with over a hundred imaginary creatures, Pokemon quickly diversified into an array of popular products including comic books, a TV show, movies, trading cards, stickers, toys, and clothing. Pokemon eventually became the top grossing children's product of all time. Yet the phenomenon fizzled as quickly as it had ignited. By 2002, the Pokemon craze was mostly over. Pikachu’s Global Adventure describes the spectacular, complex, and unpredictable rise and fall of Pokemon in countries around the world. In analyzing the popularity of Pokemon, this innovative volume addresses core debates about the globalization of popular culture and about children’s consumption of mass-produced culture. Topics explored include the origins of Pokemon in Japan’s valorization of cuteness and traditions of insect collecting and anime; the efforts of Japanese producers and American marketers to localize it for foreign markets by muting its sex, violence, moral ambiguity, and general feeling of Japaneseness; debates about children’s vulnerability versus agency as consumers; and the contentious question of Pokemon’s educational value and place in school. The contributors include teachers as well as scholars from the fields of anthropology, media studies, sociology, and education. Tracking the reception of Pokemon in Japan, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Israel, they emphasize its significance as the first Japanese cultural product to enjoy substantial worldwide success and challenge western dominance in the global production and circulation of cultural goods. Contributors. Anne Allison, Linda-Renee Bloch, Helen Bromley, Gilles Brougere, David Buckingham, Koichi Iwabuchi, Hirofumi Katsuno, Dafna Lemish, Jeffrey Maret, Julian Sefton-Green, Joseph Tobin, Samuel Tobin, Rebekah Willet, Christine Yano

"Surprisingly readable and studded with nuggets of insight." The Daily Yomiuri "This insightful, well-written, fascinating book offers new understandings, not only of Japan, but also of American culture. It is essential for those in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry who are interested in culture, as well as those in law and the business community who deal with Japan." Paul Ekman, Ph.D.,Director, Human Interaction Laboratory, Langley Porter Institute, University of California, San Francisco "[A] thoughtful cross-cultural study of development...His work can only enhance the still evolving psychoanalytic theory of preoedipal development as it is being derived mostly from psychoanalytic research on child-parent interaction in American families." Calvin F. Settlage, M.D. "Johnson's ambitious and exhaustive synthesis of anthropological and psychological treatments of dependency raises interesting questions...Johnson alerts the reader to issues of universalism and relativity and leads us to ask, 'What would psychoanalysis be like, if it had originated in Japan?'" Merry I. White, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University "...Johnson's erudite and critical re-examination of human dependence succeeds to re-profile dependence meaningfully and revives our interest in this major aspect of human experience. Indeed, much food for thought for both psychoanalysts and anthropologists." Henri Parens, M.D., Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute Western ideologies traditionally emphasize the concepts of individualism, privacy, freedom, and independence, while the prevailing ethos relegates dependency to a disparaged status. In Japanese society, the divergence from these western ideals can be found in the concept of amae (perhaps best translated as indulgent dependency) which is part of the Japanese social fiber and pervades their experience. For the Western reader, the concept of amae is somewhat alien and unfamiliar, but in order to understand the Japanese fully, it is essential to acquire a familiarity with the intensity that accompanies interdependent affiliations within their culture. To place amae in the proper context, Johnson critically examines the western attitudes toward dependency from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, developmental psychology, and anthropology. Johnson traces the development of the concept and uses of the term dependency in academic and developmental psychology in the West, including its recent eclipse by more operationally useful terms attachment and interdependency. This timely books makes use of the work of Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi, whose book The Anatomy of Dependence introduced the concept of amae to the West. Johnson goes on to illuminate the collective manner in which Japanese think and behave which is central to their socialization and educational practices, especially as seen in the stunning success of Japanese trading practices during the past twenty years. A major emphasis is placed upon the positive aspects of amae, which are compared and contrasted with attitudes toward dependency seen among other nationalities, cultures, and groups in both Western and Asian societies. Complete with a glossary of Japanese terms, Dependency and Japanese Socialization provides a comprehensive investigation into Japanese behavior.

Introduction - domesticating the west the "Depaato" - merchandising the west while selling "Japaneseness" "For Beautiful Human Life" - the use of English in Japan tractors, TV, and telephones - reach out and touch someone in a Japanese village the Japanese bath - extraordinarily ordinary messages of western style in Japanese home magazines reclaiming social and psychological space in a Japanese institution for the elderly drinking etiquette in a changing beverage market ordering in a Japanese French restaurant in Hawai'i the aesthetics and politics of "Japanese" identity in the fashion industry "Omiyage" - shopping behaviour among Japanese tourists in Hawai'i "Bwana Mickey" - constructing cultural consumption at Tokyo Disneyland paved play - rewriting culture with automobile tango in Japan and the world economy of passion.

BackgroundMedical schools differ, particularly in their teaching, but it is unclear whether such differences matter, although influential claims are often made. The Medical School Differences (MedDifs) study brings together a wide range of measures of UK medical schools, including postgraduate performance, fitness to practise issues, specialty choice, preparedness, satisfaction, teaching styles, entry criteria and institutional factors.MethodAggregated data were collected for 50 measures across 29 UK medical schools. Data includeinstitutional history(e.g. rate of production of hospital and GP specialists in the past),curricular influences(e.g. PBL schools, spend per student, staff-student ratio), selection measures(e.g. entry grades),teaching and assessment(e.g. traditional vs PBL, specialty teaching, self-regulated learning), student satisfaction, Foundation selection scores,Foundation satisfaction,postgraduate examination performance andfitness to practise(postgraduate progression, GMC sanctions). Six specialties (General Practice, Psychiatry, Anaesthetics, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Internal Medicine, Surgery) were examined in more detail.ResultsMedical school differences are stable across time (median alpha = 0.835). The 50 measures were highly correlated, 395 (32.2%) of 1225 correlations being significant withp p Problem-based learning (PBL) schools differ on many measures, including lower performance on postgraduate assessments. While these are in part explained by lower entry grades, a surprising finding is that schools such as PBL schools which reportedgreaterstudent satisfaction with feedback also showedlowerperformance at postgraduate examinations.More medical school teaching of psychiatry, surgery and anaesthetics did not result in more specialist trainees. Schools that taught more general practice did have more graduates entering GP training, but those graduates performed less well in MRCGP examinations, the negative correlation resulting from numbers of GP trainees and exam outcomes being affected both by non-traditional teaching and by greater historical production of GPs.Postgraduate exam outcomes were also higher in schools with more self-regulated learning, but lower in larger medical schools.A path model for 29 measures found a complex causal nexus, most measures causing or being caused by other measures. Postgraduate exam performance was influenced by earlier attainment, at entry to Foundation and entry to medical school (the so-called academic backbone), and by self-regulated learning.Foundation measures of satisfaction, including preparedness, had no subsequent influence on outcomes. Fitness to practise issues were more frequent in schools producing more male graduates and more GPs.ConclusionsMedical schools differ in large numbers of ways that are causally interconnected. Differences between schools in postgraduate examination performance, training problems and GMC sanctions have important implications for the quality of patient care and patient safety.