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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...

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 tells the story of the struggle to introduce a Japanese sign language program in a school for the deaf in Japan that until recently had followed the government's approach that emphasizes oral communication. Our method and conceptual framework is ethnographic, as we emphasize the cultural beliefs that underlie the three competing positions on deaf education that are in competition at Sapporo School for the Deaf.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This reflection on the essay by Rothbaum, Pott, Azuma, Miyake, and Weisz focuses on how knowledge about Japanese psychological development and culture can serve as a corrective to the ethnocentrism of Western theory. Particular attention is given to the Japanese cultural concepts of amae and kejime.

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

Introduction The Historical Context of Japanese Education to 1945 by Mark Lincicome The Development of Japanese Educational Policy, 1945-1985 by Edward R. Beauchamp Education Reform in Japan: Goals and Results of the Recent Reform Campaign by Leonard Schoppa Financing Japanese Education by Ichikawa Shogo The Japanese Preschool System by Sarane Spence Boocock Task Persistence in Japanese Elementary Schools by Priscilla N. Blinco Teaching of Mathematics in Japanese Schools by Nancy C. Whitman Japan's Science and Engineering Pipeline: Structure, Policies, and Trends by William K. Cummings The Contribution of Education to Japan's Economic Growth by Robert Evans, Jr. The Education of Women in Japan by Kumiko Fujimura-Fansrlow and Anne E. Imamura Teacher Education in Japan by Shimahara Nobuo The Role of Education in Preserving the Ethnic Identity of Korean Residents in Japan by Umakoshi Toru "Examination Hell" by Peter Frost The Future of Japanese Higher Education by Kitamura Kazuyuki Postscript: What Can We Learn from Japan? by Edward R. Beauchamp Index

"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.

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