Joseph Tobin

Quality in Early Childhood Education: An Anthropologist's Perspective.

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.

Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon

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 childrens 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

The Irony of Self-Expression.

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 ethics of polyvocal ethnography: empowering vs. textualizing children and teachers

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 peoples lives and words. The authors reflect on those ethical dilemmas in this article.

Visual anthropology and multivocal ethnography: A dialogical approach to Japanese preschool class size

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

Chinese Early Childhood Educators’ Perspectives On Dealing with a Crying Child

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.

Using the Japanese problem as a corrective to the ethnocentricity of Western theory

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.

An anthropologist’s reflections on defining quality in education research

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 Power of Implicit Teaching Practices: Continuities and Discontinuities in Pedagogical Approaches of Deaf and Hearing Preschools in Japan.

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.

Scaling up as catachresis

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.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.