How Artists and Teachers Are in the Classroom With Children: In a Case of a Japanese Preschool

• In Event: Putting the Teacher in the Picture: Perspectives From Early Childhood Education in Japan, Sweden, Finland, and Brooklyn

Abstract

In Japanese early childhood education, schoolification in the form of teaching programs like English lesson are spreading, as these programs can be the selling points for parents. On the theoretical level, on the contrary, the dominant view adopted in the national curriculum guideline is the Jiyu-Hoiku, or free education and care, in which children’s free play is thought to be central. The latter view, though it stresses the importance of the agency of children, is not enough to overcome the former, more instructive, pedagogy, even theoretically. Both views, though apparently opposing, have one important characteristic in common: A lack of focus on teachers and other adults who engage with children. In the former view, the teacher is reduced to a bundle of instructional methods, and children’s development is thought of as the accumulation of given knowledge and skills. In the latter view, the teacher is just someone who watch children’s free play from the outside, only allowed to set the environment while children are supposed to develop individualistically without engaging with adults. This apparent opposition can be overcome by focusing on the teacher’s way of being with children (Lave, 1996; Rogoff,1993).

This paper is theoretically based on the view of dialogic pedagogy (Author 4, 2014) and challenges the problem of how the teacher should be with children in the ECEC. In the dialogic view, the triadic relations (Linell, 2009) between, in ECEC, children – world – adult, form the basic framework for the analysis. The relation between children and world does not exist on its own, nor does the relation between children and adult exist on its own. Children and adult engage each other as ones who act in their unique ways toward the world they share. How adults act toward the world, or towards the topic of, for example, children’s play will have much influence on the quality of ECEC, and so this is the topic of our study.

The study is based on ethnographic observation and interview data collected in one Japanese preschool, which is participating in the international playworld network (Author 2, 2011). What is unique in this preschool’s practice is its emphasis of children’s art activities. In these art activities children find it possible to commit the rich explorations: they look for something new on their producing artwork, denying their old attempts, and try to find out their own works (Author 5, 2017). The children’s explorative attitude seems to become possible through the active intervention of artists and teachers. Teachers, for example, give some hints to children to stimulate their imaginative play, which later, in their art activities, provides some resources and motivations. Artists, for example, add something to children’s artworks in progress in the form of proposals concerning the direction of their production. Our study suggests that, for these adults’ intervention to really be effective, it is necessary for adults to share the topic and the world children are engaging within their art activity and play, to get deeply involved and to enjoy themselves.

Author

• Kiyotaka Miyazaki, Waseda University