Living Together: The Bodily Life of Preschools in China and the United States

• In Event: 16.042 - Making Embodied and Material Early Childhood Education Practices Visible

Abstract

This paper explores how preschools in China and the United States are sites for producing children with culturally appropriate bodily practices. By analyzing the everyday routines of preschools, such as arrivals, meals, and naps, I examine how children, in each national context, learn to use, think about, and care for their bodies.

The methodological orientation is primarily ethnographic, in the sense that the goal is to explicate the emic beliefs, knowledge, and practices concerning the body in preschools in China and the U.S., which I study by using a combination of video-cued interviews with preschool teachers, micro-analyses of video-taped classroom routines, and analysis of artifacts and texts, such as classroom signage and curriculum standards.

Informed by Marcel Mauss’s (1973) idea that the body as “man’s first and most natural instrument”(p. 79), I explore how children learn to use their bodies in characteristic ways that Mauss called “techniques of the body.” For example, the analysis of mealtimes suggests that children learn to eat in ways that vary in each context, such as appropriate use of utensils, etiquettes (i.e., which food can be eaten with hands), postures, and demeanor.

Besides learning individual bodily practices, preschools are also places where children learn how to use their bodies in relation to others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Erving Goffman’s theories of the intercorporeal aspects of embodiment are illuminating for understanding the choreography of bodies in a social space like preschools. Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) conceptualization of “intercorporeality” and Goffman’s (1963) analyses of the coordination of bodies in public spaces in mundane life are informative for understanding how children learn how to eat, sit, and walk, not only as individuals, but also in coordination and synchronization with others. Chinese society is often characterized as collective and U.S mainstream culture as individual (Hsu, 1981; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). However, my analysis suggests that in both contexts children learn to function as a community by coordinating their bodies and doing things together.

In preschools, children not only learn how to use their bodies but also learn about the body. Analyses of mealtimes suggest that during eating, children not only learn culturally characteristic table etiquettes but also are introduced to their culture’s beliefs, knowledge, and values about food, health, and hygiene, more specifically, notions of “germs” and “diseases”, “clean” and “dirty”, “hot” and “cold”, and what is good or bad to the body. These bodily practices and discourses are related to Michel Foucault’s (1986) concept of “the care of the self” and to what Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang (2005), following Foucault, conceptualize as “biopolitics,” which they define as the role bodily practices play in social cohesion and self-cultivation.

By highlighting the role of the body in early schooling and early socialization, this study continues and enriches to a recent line of scholarship that reflects efforts to bring the body back into early childhood education.

Author

• Chang Liu, University of Georgia - Athens