Upholding Children’s Rights to Literacy in One Japanese Preschool

• In Event: The Productive (In)actions of Do-Nothing Literacies

Abstract

Time for literacies in early childhood education (ECE) spaces are often tempered by competing visions of ECE: as nurturing a child-centered space for play or as building the academic foundation for later career success. In Japan, such tensions are being felt between its longstanding child-centered philosophy of ECE (Hayashi, 2011) and new curriculum policies to address a “first-grade problem,” whereby some children are perceived to enter elementary school unprepared for its academic standards and expected behavior. In this paper, I examine how such tensions are addressed in the case of one transitional time observed in a Japanese yōchien (preschool), where children, prior to a morning meeting, were left largely to themselves for 35 minutes. Drawing on a multi-site case study of Japanese pre- and primary schools, whereby classroom observations, images, interviews of teachers and policy documents are traced (Law, 2007) into curricular networks, I consider how this particular gap in the schedule—where children interacted freely with books, plants, a CD player, and their peers—honored children's rights to their own literacies (International Literacy Association, 2024) and resisted capitalist logics of time (Odell, 2019) in curriculum.

Building off of this data tracing, I think-with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) Japanese concepts of ma (間), the meaningful space between objects, and mimamoru, a pedagogy of watchful waiting practiced by preschool teachers, to ultimately view the teacher's deliberate non-intervention, that is, “doing nothing" (Odell, 2019), as actually producing "vitality" (Boldt, 2020) in the classroom space. I show how the teacher, who later reflected on the moment as "a time to say that it is okay to go at your own pace," can be seen acting through productive refusal. In doing so, this paper speaks to the trend of curriculum reforms increasingly prioritizing standardization and efficiency to prepare children for primary school, and, alternatively, how upholding children's rights to literacy may require such refusals of these trends in order to preserve time to “dwell in-between” (Aoki, 2005) official and unofficial school literacies, such that vital literacies may flourish.

Author

• Daniel E. Ferguson, George Mason University