Akiko Hayashi

Keio University · Faculty of Business and Commerce

In this paper, Teaching Expertise in Three Countries project is used as an example to show the significance and contribution of international comparative research and to think about the possible implications for policy in early childhood education. The project studied the development of expertise in preschool teaching in Japan, China, and the Unite...

In Teaching Expertise in Three Countries, Akiko Hayashi shows how teachers from Japan, China, and the United States think about what it means to be an expert teacher. Based on interviews with teachers conducted over the span of fifteen years and videos taken in their classrooms, Hayashi gives us a valuable portrait of expert teachers in the making....

School-based Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs emerged in North America and have not traditionally focused on embodied learning processes that are situated in the learners’ contexts and lived experiences. Thus, we present evidence and advance the case that transferable social-emotional competencies are inherently culturally responsive or sit...

This personal, tentative, self-reflective essay explores some Japanese ways of conducting comparative educational research. In this essay, I not only describe a Japanese style of conducting comparative education research but also do so in a Japanese way. The four key elements I discuss are: daijini (taking care), soboku (simplicity), nagaime (long...

本書は、いかにして日本の幼稚園・保育所が子どもたちの社会性や情緒の発達を支え、社会への足場かけとしての役割を果たすのかに着目しているが、もっと大きなストーリーを物語っているとも考えられる。本書は、いかに日本の子どもたちが日本の幼稚園・保育所において、「日本人」に育ちゆくかについてのストーリーである。

This chapter describes and analyzes a pedagogical practice that Japanese preschool teachers routinely use to support young children’s social-emotional development. The central argument is that Japanese preschool teachers deal with children’s disputes by employing pedagogical practices that work to scaffold the development of a collective rather tha...

This article demonstrates how the original Preschool in Three Cultures method can be extended and modified. Modifications to the method include using videos not only as interviewing cues but also as data for microanalysis; conducting multiple return interviews with the same informants; re‐editing videos to draw more explicit attention to key issues...

This is an ethnographic study of how two Japanese kindergartens are implementing the yōhoichigenka policy aimed at reforming the Japanese early childhood education system. The cases of these two kindergartens demonstrate what happens when a top-down mandate reaches the level of individual programs. The programs creatively find ways of responding to...

This paper uses examples from research conducted in preschools in Japan, China, and the United States to illustrate the features and virtues of return interviews with informants with whom ethnographers have long research engagements. Return interviews and long research engagements are powerful research strategies that help the ethnographers ask mor...

This book explores how teachers act, think, and talk. The authors embedded themselves in the classrooms of three Japanese preschool teachers. Drawing on extended interviews, observations, and hours of video footage, they focus on how teachers embody their lessons: how they use their hands to gesture, comfort, or discipline; how they direct their po...

This paper briefly reviews theories of embodiment and then provides an example from our recent work on how we use video in our comparative studies of preschools to highlight embodied and implicit cultural pedagogies. The example we present focuses on how Japanese preschool teachers use the Japanese cultural practice of mimamoru (teaching by watchin...

Preschools in Japan, as elsewhere, are key sites of child development, socialization, and enculturation. A series of ethnographically informed studies of Japanese preschools have identified and explicated approaches to early childhood education that are very unlike those of preschools in other countries. Many of these features of Japanese preschool...

Meisei Gakuen, a private school for the deaf in Tokyo, is the only school for the deaf in Japan that uses Japanese Sign Language (JSL) as the primary language of instruction and social interaction. We see Meisei as a useful case for bringing out core issues in Japanese deaf and early childhood education, as well as for making larger arguments about...

This article presents a reanalysis of a scene we early filmed and edited in a Japanese preschool classroom. We use a variety of visual and narrative strategies to reframe the video, shifting attention from those we had in earlier editing and analyses decided were peripheral to the action. The article uses this example to address larger questions ab...

In a sample (n = 235) of 30-, 42-, and 54-month-olds, the relations among parenting, effortful control (EC), impulsivity, and children's committed compliance were examined. Parenting was assessed with mothers' observed sensitivity and warmth; EC was measured by mothers' and caregivers' reports, as well as a behavioral task; impulsivity was assessed...

In Child Research Net, http://www.childresearch.net/

In Child Research Net, http://www.childresearch.net/

This paper explores the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) approach to curriculum policy in early childhood education. The Kindergarten Curriculum Guideline contains few directives or practical suggestions for teachers. The abstractness and indirectness of the MEXT approach to establishing curricular guid...

Abstract This article examines Japanese teachers' beliefs about children's peripheral participation in emotional interactions in the classroom, and especially in fights. The article is based on a reanalysis of scenes of fighting in Japanese preschools from Tobin and colleagues' 2009 book and video, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited. The reanaly...

Abstract Among the lessons to be learned in Japanese preschool is how to experience, present, and respond to feelings. We suggest that the feeling most emphasized in Japanese preschools is sabishiisa (loneliness). Japanese preschool educators draw attention to feelings of sabishiisa, or loneliness, to promote a desire in young children for social c...