Teaching Embodied

This new book by Press author Joe Tobin and coauthor Akiko Hayashi is a study of how Japanese preschool teachers act, think, and talk.  More specifically, it is a study of the "implicit cultural practices” they use to support young children’s social-emotional development.  Like Tobin et al.’s 2009 book Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited, this book is centered on the everyday professional practices, recorded on video, of three Japanese preschool teachers working in three Japanese early childhood contexts.  The authors use videos filmed in each teacher’s classroom as interviewing cues; but unlike those studies, here they also use the videos as data, presenting microanalyses of key scenes.  The authors not only attend to the teachers’ verbal reflections on their practice; they also pay attention to teachers’ techniques of the body, which they suggest are key components of their practice.  In fact, the authors argue that much of what Japanese preschool teachers do in their classrooms, including the ways they deal with children’s fights, features the use of techniques of the body.  Featuring dozens of illustrations, this book promises to be a classic of early childhood education and Japanese studies for years to come.