Social Emotional and Embodied Learning in Japanese Sociocultural Contexts

• In Event: Culturally Relevant Embodied and Social-Emotional Learning in Asian, African, and North American Contexts

Abstract

In this talk I focus on how situated and embodied learning processes could be incorporated into social emotional learning in various geographic locations and cultures, particularly in Japan. Using examples from my own research as well as literature, I argue that culture matters in SEL. This argument builds on mixture of scholarship in the fields of cultural psychology, anthropology, and comparative education, writing that have made an argument for the value of culture in child development and early learning.
While Social Emotional Learning is a relatively new concept in Japan, Japanese parents and early childhood educators highly value and emphasize social-emotional development for young children. In Japanese preschools, social-emotional development is considered and seen as a set of experiences that are tied to embodied learning processes. Hayashi and Tobin (2015) discussed how activities such as peer play or peer interactions are connected to embodied emotions and embodied learning in Japanese preschools. Japanese young children frequently transfer forms of emotional exchange learned at home with their family members to their interactions with their classmates in preschool. The embodiment of emotions can be observed when children engage in peer aggression in the classroom or on the playground, including behaviors such as biting, screaming, hitting, kicking, or fighting.
Japanese preschool teachers emphasize giving children experiences not only of feelings such as sadness, anger, and frustration, but also of feelings that are more directly sensory, such as hunger, tiredness, and being cold, dirty, and wet. As Eyal Ben-Ari (1997) and Daniel Walsh (2002; 2004) have emphasized, there is a premium in Japanese preschools on embodied experiences including running, jumping, and climbing; fighting; engaging with the natural world; and gathering so close together that bodies touch, which Ben-Ari calls “grouping” that is consistent with Japanese collectivist culture. This closeness or “grouping” is also reflected in the practice of co-sleeping, where parents and children sleep in sensory proximity to one other. Through these activities and practices, children develop a sense of membership in Japanese society.
What Japanese children need to learn is not simply a formality but alterations of conduct in different situations (e.g., self-awareness, self-management, and social-awareness skills): in formal and informal contexts; with insiders and with outsiders; in different places (temples vs. baths); in different parts of the same place (front vs. rear doors of houses); and at different times (the ceremonies that open and close events vs. during the events themselves). Japanese employ formal and informal registers, both linguistically and with their bodies. Children are required to identify the context, know what words and bodily movements are appropriate to that context, and then use the appropriate words and movements. Japanese preschools present young children with a variety of temporal, spatial, and situational contexts, calling for a variety of language registers and modes of bodily comportment.

Author

• Akiko Hayashi, Keio University