Learning to Master Yishi (意识) in a Chinese Preschool

• In Event: Reimagining Early Childhood Education Research Using Video-Cued Ethnography

Abstract

It is 2:30 in the afternoon at Zizhu Preschool in Shanghai. Children are waking up from naps. Di Di, a three-year-old boy in the Orange class, climbs out of his bed and tries to put on his sweater. Standing next to his bed, he stares at his sweater and freezes, seemingly puzzled. The teachers, Ms. Ji and Ms. Hu are busy moving around, helping children get dressed. However, whenever they approach Di Di, they only give him a minimal amount of help. On a cursory glance, the teachers’ reactions seem to be too harsh—letting a three-year-old struggle on his own—and are easy to read as inattentive to the boy’s needs. Walking back and forth between Di Di and other children and giving him little assistance also appears to be a bad strategy of classroom management. When I asked the teachers why they would not just help Di Di put on his sweater, which could be a more efficient use of time for the teacher and also less stressful for the child. The answer was straightforward: “Because Di Di needs to have the yishi (意识) to do it on his own.”

Drawing on what Jerome Bruner (1996) calls “folk pedagogy” and what Tobin and his colleagues term “implicit cultural logic” (Tobin, Hsueh, & Karasawa, 2009, p. 225), I look into Di Di’s dressing episode as well as other preschool activities involving yishi, an emic construct that is not prescribed in national curriculum guidelines nor systematically taught in teacher preparation programs but that intuitively guides Chinese preschool teachers’ everyday practices and organizes children’s embodied learning experience.

This paper draws from a larger ethnographic study of everyday bodily practices in two preschools: one in the Southeast United States, and one in Shanghai, China. My research method combines the use of classroom videos as data for microlevel analyses with the use of these videos as interviewing cues with preschool teachers (Adair & Kurban, 2019b).

My finding suggests that yishi is not prescribed in curriculum guidelines or learning standards but implicitly shared by the teachers who believe that yishi is the most important goal to achieve in the first year of preschool as it will provide a solid foundation for their life in the future. The form of yishi that children are learning to master through handling bodily practices is not only personal, but also intercorporeal, cultural, and ethical.

This study highlights the implicit, tacit, local beliefs and practices in a Chinese preschool that is not quite the same as Western developmental psychology’s domain-defined notions of child development. In so doing, this study contributes to the reconceptualizing scholarship that has been challenging the hegemony of child development knowledge in the field of early childhood education (Bloch, 2000; Kessler & Swadener, 1992; Lubeck, 2000) by offering different ways of thinking of the notion of “development” and “learning.”

Author

• Chang Liu