Bringing LeVinean Methods and Concerns to Studies of Japanese Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Contributions of Anthropology to Educational Research: The Continuing Legacy of Robert A. LeVine

Abstract

Having studied with Robert LeVine in Chicago in the 1970s, my paper emphasizes how key ideas from early in his career have influenced the ongoing trajectory of my research on preschools. I use a discussion of my current study on Deaf Kindergartens in Three Cultures: Japan, France, and the United States, to highlight the contributions of LeVine’s comparative cultural studies of child-rearing. I emphasize how his work on parenting and community in Africa can be adapted to studies of early childhood education and more generally can serve the project of improving education and the public good by conducting and presenting research in ways that questions taken-for-granted educational assumptions and expands the repetoire of the possible in education practice and policy.
LeVine’s work in the 1970s outlined an agenda for research as well as research methods in the field of what was then called “culture and personality studies.” This agenda and these methods are still useful today, especially for studies of early childhood education. One of the core arguments of my paper is that the central concerns and methods of LeVine’s enthographic studies of child rearing in Africa can be adapted for studying preschools, a move that makes sense for contemporary societies such as Italy and Japan where the great majority of children under five receive much of their acculturation experiences in preschool.
The studies I discuss in this paper build on and extend some key elements of LeVine’s program for ethnographic research on child development, acculturation, and education, including his ideas for systematic cross-cultural comparisons and collaborative ethnographic work between cultural insiders and outsiders.
In this talk I present a series of video clips of Japanese preschool children’s verbal and physical alteractions, clips taken from both my Preschool in Three Cultures studies and my new study of Deaf Kindergartens. I use these clips and teachers’ reflections on these clips to highlight some core cultural beliefs and practices of Japanese early childhood educators. My focus is on Japanese pedagogical beliefs about how teachers can scaffold the development in young children of a characteristically Japanese sense of self and of communal mechanisms for controlling impulses and mediating disputes, a topic I trace back to ideas LeVine developed years ago based on fieldwork in Africa about cultural variation in the superego and his notion of collective superego functions. More specifically I present an analysis of a Japanese form of legitimate peripheral participation that is based on the power of what a Japanese preschool director described to me as the gyarari (gallery) of children surrounding a fight, children we originally perceived to be (only) peripherally involved and now see as the events’ core participants. I present an analysis of an extended dispute in a Deaf kindergarten class in Tokyo as an example of a Japanese pedagogical belief and practice of mimamoru (watching and waiting) in which, by restraining her temptation to intervene, the teacher creates an opportunity for the gyarari and the seken no me (“the eyes of society”) to function.

Author

• Joseph J. Tobin, University of Georgia