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Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited

Article  in  Comparative Education Review · May 2009

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 Moderated Discussion
Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited
Introduction

When Preschool in Three Cultures was published in 1989, it attracted great

attention, as a result of the insights into the three cultures explored as well
as the methodology that anchored the research. The book was released when
education systems in Asia were attracting attention from outside observers
eager to learn more about the factors responsible for the dramatic economic
growth that had occurred in China and Japan. What made the book so
intriguing to many scholars, regardless of their geographical areas of interest,
however, was the unique methodology employed by Joseph Tobin, David Wu,
and Dana Davidson. The researchers videotaped activities conducted at pre-
schools in Japan, China, and the United States, showed those videotapes to
members of those three school communities, and asked them to comment
on what they saw. This technique, which Tobin, Wu, and Davidson termed
“video-cued multivocal ethnography,” shifted attention from the actual events
captured on video to the reactions of parents, teachers, school administrators,
and faculty at university early childhood education programs. One of the
goals of the project was to facilitate “an ongoing dialogue between insiders
and outsiders, practitioners and researchers” (Tobin, Wu, and Davidson 1989,
4). Rather than focus on the significance of key events, as is common in
more traditional ethnographies, the analysis in Preschool in Three Cultures cen-
tered on observers’ reactions to activities filmed in the preschools.
Recently, Tobin conducted a follow-up to his groundbreaking study. The
researcher, with a new team of collaborators, returned to the three schools
profiled in the original book to update and expand the original study. Preschool
in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan, and the United States, which is scheduled
for release by the University of Chicago Press in July 2009, explores continuity
and change in the three preschools profiled in the earlier volume. The basic
methodological framework is similar, with videos recorded at the sample of
schools and shown to members of the school communities, as well as out-
siders, and transcripts of the ensuing discussions analyzed by Tobin and his
colleagues. The scope of the follow-up study, however, was complicated by
additional temporal and physical layers: two schools from each country were
included in the sample, and the researchers compared data collected at two
different points in time. As Tobin and colleagues observe, the expanded scope
of the new study allows for both cross-cultural and historical comparisons.
The Comparative Education Review (CER) invited five scholars to respond

Comparative Education Review, vol. 53, no. 2.

䉷 2009 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved.
0010-4086/2009/5302-0005$10.00

Comparative Education Review 259

 MODERATED DISCUSSION

to material from the new book. The group of participants was organized to
represent a range of views and areas of expertise. Included in the group are
Susan Holloway, Catherine Lewis, Lynn Paine, Hidetada Shimizu, and Gita
Steiner-Khamsi. Collectively, these five scholars have conducted research on
preschool education in the three countries that Tobin and his colleagues
studied. The five discussants also share Tobin’s interest in his research meth-
odology. All participants were provided access to the videos included in Pre-
school in Three Cultures Revisited, along with excerpts of the sections in the
book that discussed those scenes. Next, they were asked to respond to two
questions, one focused on the methodology and the other on the analysis
provided in the book. Finally, in an effort to facilitate a dialogue, responses
to those questions were shared among the group, and participants were asked
to comment on what they found most interesting about the remarks made
by their colleagues in this moderated discussion.
The editors of CER hope that this discussion will initiate an ongoing
dialogue among members of the Comparative and International Education
Society (CIES). With this in mind, Joseph Tobin has made available the video
clips referred to in this moderated discussion in the electronic version of this
journal. We also encourage you to share your reactions to the clips—and to
the moderated discussion—by posting comments in the discussion forum
within the Web site of the Comparative and International Education Society
(http://www.cies.us/forum). Doing so will produce a truly multivocal dis-
cussion of Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited.
Christopher Bjork

OPENING STATEMENT

Continuity and Change in Preschool in Three Cultures

JOSEPH TOBIN

In the mid-1980s I worked with my colleagues David Wu and Dana Davidson

on a research project that in 1989 became the book Preschool in Three Cultures:
Japan, China, and the United States. Twenty years later, in the spring of 2009,
the sequel is being published: Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan,
and the United States, a book based on research my colleagues Yeh Hsueh,
Mayumi Karasawa, and I conducted in preschools in China, Japan, and the
United States from 2002–7.
In his 1983 book Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian argues that eth-
nography as a genre of research lacks a sense of time, as it locates its subjects
outside of history, in a timeless ethnographic present. Following Fabian’s
logic, we can fault Preschool in Three Cultures for insufficiently historicizing the

260 May 2009

 MODERATED DISCUSSION

cultural practices it described. Our new study gives us the chance to address
that shortcoming by adding an explicitly historical, diachronic dimension to
the original study’s synchronic focus on cultural comparison. Preschool in Three
Cultures Revisited foregrounds the question of historical continuity and change
by analyzing preschools in China, Japan, and the United States at two points
in historical time—circa 1984 and 2004.
The challenge of diachronic ethnography is to add a sense of time to
ethnography without placing the other cultures we study on our time line.
We need to see Chinese, Japanese, and American systems of early childhood
education as existing in time, without assuming that they are ahead or behind
each other, and all moving along the same time line, as, for example, the
time lines of modernization, rationalization, or globalization. We need, that
is, a theory and a method that allows us think simultaneously about space
and time and to place preschools simultaneously in their historical and cul-
tural contexts.
The method we use in the new study is an extension of the old one, a
method we formally call “video-cued multivocal ethnography” but that others
and we most often refer to as “the Preschool in Three Cultures method.” In this
method we (1) videotape a day in a preschool in each culture; (2) edit the
videotape down to 20 minutes; (3) show this edited tape first to the teacher
in whose classroom we filmed; (4) then to other staff at her preschool; (5)
then to early childhood educators at other preschools around the country;
(6) and finally to early childhood educators in the other two countries. The
result is a video-cued multivocal conversation—early childhood educators in
three countries discussing the same set of videos. In this method the video-
tapes are not the data; rather, they are cues, stimuli, topics for discussion,
interviewing tools.
In the new study we analyze processes of continuity and change in each
of the three cultures in three ways. The first is by replicating the original
study a generation later in the same preschools, once again making videotapes
and showing them to our concentric circles of informants, from the classroom
teachers to their counterparts in other regions of their country and abroad.
The second way is by showing the old videotapes to current and retired staff
from each of the three original preschools and asking them to comment on
what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and why. The third is by videotaping
in a second preschool in each culture, one that represents a new direction
in each nation’s approach to early childhood education, and then conducting
focus-group interviews about the video with cultural insiders and outsiders.
By choosing for the second preschool in each country a program that thinks
of itself and is thought of by others as representing a new direction, we created
a new set of videotapes that work to focus discussions with informants on the
question of continuity and change.
We won’t share findings here—you’ll have to read (and, we hope, buy!)

Comparative Education Review 261

 MODERATED DISCUSSION

the book. A simple, Goldilocks version of our findings would be that over
the past 20 years Chinese preschools changed a lot, Japanese preschools not
very much, and U.S. preschools are somewhere in between, with dramatic
changes in provision and funding but relatively little change in teacher beliefs
and in classroom practices. The more complicated, nuanced version of this
story is that there is more continuity than meets the eye in China’s early
childhood educational change, more dynamism and angst in Japan’s conti-
nuity of preschool practices and beliefs than is conveyed by the term “con-
tinuity,” and more class and ideological tensions in the U.S. contemporary
situation than is conveyed by the narrative of a country inching toward cre-
ating a national system of preprimary education. Key themes we discuss in
the book that cut across the three countries include the localization/indi-
genization of globally circulating education discourses and practices
(Schriewer 2000; Steiner-Khamsi 2004); the resilience of implicit cultural
practices that, because they are not written in guidelines or covered in text-
books, are relatively resistant to reform; and the relativity of time and space
in the workings of educational reform—2004 in Kunming, China, is not quite
the same time as 2004 in Shanghai.
We have placed on the CER Web site video clips that provide examples
of the continuity and change we found in our study. To provide the thinking
behind the practices seen in the videos, we have paired each video clip with
an excerpt from the new book. We provide an example of curriculum change
in China with clips of block play in 1984 and 2002 at Daguan Preschool in
Kunming (a preschool we called by the pseudonym Dong Feng in the original
book) and a clip of sociodramatic play at Sinan Road Preschool in Shanghai,
a program that represents a new, progressive direction in Chinese early child-
hood education. As an example of continuity of practices and beliefs in Japan,
we provide clips of teachers choosing not to intervene in children’s fights at
Komatsudani Hoikuen, in Kyoto, in 1984 and 2002, and of a different ap-
proach to dealing with a fight in a scene from our video of a day at Madoka
Yochien in Tokyo. The U.S. example we present is of an “activity center”
scene from our new video of St. Timothy’s Child Center in Honolulu. The
video clip and the accompanying text show a continuity of practice with St.
Timothy’s in 1985—a focus on language development and self-expression
through “whole language” activities in a changing political context in which
teachers are under increasing pressure from parents, politicians, and ac-
creditors to teach skills.

Question 1: Joseph Tobin states that the sequel to Preschool in Three Cultures
adds “an explicitly historical, diachronic dimension to the original study’s
synchronic focus on cultural comparison.” How do you think this method-
ological approach expands our understanding of early childhood education
in these three countries/cultures? What questions or issues does it raise?

262 May 2009

 MODERATED DISCUSSION

SUSAN D. HOLLOWAY

In this new volume, Tobin returns to the three schools he filmed for his 1989
book and also films a second school in each country. Thus, he expands the
original book in two important ways—adding the perspective of change over
time and highlighting the existence of within-culture variability. Both new
dimensions contribute significantly to the impact of the new book.
As Tobin points out in his introductory remarks, the decision in the first
volume to film a single “stimulus” school in each country has been criticized
by some readers. Tobin acknowledges that the school and classroom contexts
they selected partially drive the issues raised by viewers of the film clips but
argues that viewer comments are the real “data” and reflect the variability
that exists within and across nations. In the sequel, Tobin has added an
additional school in each nation, thereby expanding the range of issues that
are elicited for each country. I like this move to complicate the analysis and
can see additional ways of examining within-country patterns.
One such idea would be to probe more systematically the perceptions of
cultural insiders who criticize a practice featured in the film. For example,
I would be interested in learning whether there are a few different philo-
sophical threads that lie behind the Japanese viewers’ responses to the re-
lational aggression displayed in the Japanese segments. One could start by
examining whether the viewer responses to one scene cluster into a few
patterns and whether these patterns show up in response to other scenes.
This process may result in the identification of, for example, a subgroup of
Japanese viewers whose philosophy focuses on the role of adults in providing
explicit moral guidance (a view that is represented in certain Japanese ed-
ucational settings), as opposed to those who believe that children learn best
by being exposed to the consequences of their own actions. I would also like
to explore whether patterns are associated with particular kinds of institutions
(e.g., preschools vs. child-care centers) or other structural indicators.
Future work can address more explicitly cultural norms concerning the
evaluation of self and others in a professional context and perhaps can play
with various methods of eliciting viewer perceptions. Tobin discusses this issue
briefly in his first book, pointing out the hesitancy of some Chinese partic-
ipants to verbalize their perceptions to visiting anthropologists. In Japan,
norms concerning evaluation and criticism are also complex. While self-
reflection and criticism among peers (e.g., fellow teachers) is a frequent
occurrence, it is orchestrated in certain specific forms, exemplified by the
practice of lesson study (Lewis, Perry, and Murata 2006). When I have con-
ducted group interviews with Japanese preschool teachers, they would speak
about their own perceived failure to implement school policies but were not
forthcoming about whether they disagreed with those policies. Individual
interviews yielded more criticism of school policies and more emphasis on

Comparative Education Review 263

 MODERATED DISCUSSION

how structural forces such as budgetary constraints impeded pedagogical

intentions (Holloway 2000).

CATHERINE LEWIS

“Teaching is a cultural activity.” I hear this phrase often in my line of work.

It is a quote from James Stigler and James Hiebert, whose analyses of video-
tapes from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)
stunned viewers with how very differently mathematics is conceived and
taught in Germany, the United States, and Japan (Stigler and Hiebert 1999).
When U.S. educators say “teaching is a cultural activity,” they almost invariably
follow with reasons that they can’t easily change what is happening in their
own classrooms. Culture is regarded as immutable.
So it is fascinating to see how much does change, even in 20 years, in
the preschools studied by Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa. The sequel videotapes
remind us that people create culture, and people can change culture. The
block activities in the Chinese preschool are the most remarkable example
of change across the two time periods. In 1984, students sit in rows of desks
in a bare-walled classroom, as the teacher prescribes how they must use the
small parquetry blocks to re-create a particular design. She physically and
verbally makes sure that each student does as instructed and students comply
quietly. In 2002, the teacher tells students they can build what they please;
children literally jump (and yell) for joy as they transition from the classroom
to a special mural-adorned block playroom filled with an enormous range
of different-sized colored blocks. Children take the lead in using the blocks
for pursuits ranging from building large structures to making guns and tele-
phones; teachers seem to follow the lead of students who have invited them
into these games.
The change in the students’ block play somehow parallels quite nicely
the dramatic changes in Chinese politics and economy over the same period,
as the country has gone from centrally planned socialism to capitalist com-
petition. We imagine that yesterday’s Dong Feng preschoolers were adept at
complying with instructions, and today’s Dong Feng preschoolers adept at
taking initiative. So how did this change happen? Much research conducted
in the West suggests that it is not easy for teachers to change their educational
beliefs and practices (Cohen and Ball 2001; Fullan 2001)—but perhaps that
is just because U.S. teachers are more isolated than their counterparts in
other countries. Japan has a system of hoiku-kenkyuu, similar to the system of
lesson study (jugyou kenkyuu) for elementary teachers, which engages teachers
in shared observation and discussion of preschool lessons (Lewis and Tsuch-
ida 1997). Preschools that want to experiment with a new idea, such as
nurturing student autonomy, may apply for a grant to be a designated re-
search school, where teachers collaborate to bring to life the new educational

264 May 2009

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philosophy (often in consultation with researchers) and where they eventually

invite other preschool educators to observe and discuss their innovative prac-
tice. These snapshots of practice across 20 years should provoke us to rethink
what we “know” about the pace and nature of change in educational beliefs
and practices—and in culture more broadly.

LYNN PAINE

Having long appreciated the methodological contributions of Preschool in

Three Cultures, I have regularly discussed its challenges with my students. My
Chinese students, in particular, would worry, even in the early 1990s, about
what seemed like dated images of a changing reality; they also expressed
concern about the selection of a school from an inland city as the focal
Chinese preschool. While I accepted the authors’ premise that the schools
depicted served more as projective stimuli for layers of conversations than as
data, these class discussions reminded me that characterizing “culture” at a
national level posed big challenges related to temporal and spatial boundaries.
The sequel to the original book provides a thoughtful and thought-
provoking response to these challenges. In the new book, we benefit from
seeing a single site (and conversations engendered by it) at two points in
time. This reminds us of a too often ignored piece in ethnography: the
passage of time. It also invites us as readers to puzzle over the ways in which
preschools in these three cultures are simultaneously carriers of tradition
and reflections of change. This shift from the original method puts time
directly on our horizon in a way that the initial text could not.
Of course, as readers of the original book, we had opportunities to learn
about preschool in historical context. History and change do enter the plot-
line of the original volume. Why does this new methodological tack—of
revisiting the initial schools—somehow allow us to see things differently? More
important, this approach gives the voices most present in the text opportu-
nities to speak more concretely about key ideas, beliefs, and values. By having
images at two points in time as the stimulus for discussion, the conversations
in the new book provide richer, more multilayered ways of making visible
the complex facets of cultural practices. While the purpose of using the two
points may have been to trace out possible lines of development (and areas
of continuity), considering two points gives the speakers referents to articulate
more clearly what they now think, believe, hope, and do.
One side question that this approach raised for me relates to the unspo-
ken stability of these schools. Despite all the broader social, economic, and
political changes that have occurred in Japan, China, and the United States
since the mid-1980s, the original focal preschools still existed in 2002. More
striking was that most of the original teachers and directors were still around
and, in some cases, even teaching. I wonder how many restaurants, small

Comparative Education Review 265

 MODERATED DISCUSSION

enterprises, larger businesses, or families in each of these countries have

experienced the same level of stability. As we think about continuity and
change in early childhood education, it is worth our considering how much
developments in that field are reflective of similar levels of change or stasis
in other sectors of society.
The decision to videotape and interview at a second school in each coun-
try, one that represents what the authors sought as new approaches in pre-
school education, is tremendously important. Here we have the opportunity
to explore variation and nuances within cultures in ways that were not possible
(at least not so directly possible) before. The video clips and the accompa-
nying explanation help us see teachers enacting very different approaches
from a range of practices that share a common cultural script. Without the
opportunity to see that range, our understanding—as outsiders—of the script
would more limited; we could too easily take the script as that—a flat,
bounded script, without the possibility for range that only insiders can inhabit,
enact, or use.

HIDETADA SHIMIZU

What’s most significance about Tobin’s new study is the persistence of the
cultural themes that were introduced in the first study and found again in
their new study, in spite of the changes that affected all three societies. Such
are core propositions without which one cannot say or do most things one
does in everyday life. In Japan, for example, the core assumption about the
“nondual” nature of two seemingly contradictory aspects of social reality, such
as outside appearance of a teacher’s behavior and her real pedagogical intent,
is a theme that runs though the “old” and “new” studies. One also sees
continuity in the basic cultural belief about the “sovereignty” of each person’s
individual opinions and preferences in the U.S. preschools: this idea is ex-
plicitly taught to the children “now” and “then” as well as utilized by the
teachers and administrators themselves when they are justifying their edu-
cational views and practices in the “new” school. Although the content of
Chinese preschool education changed from a focus on collective discipline
to more individualized, student-centered approach, at its core it maintains
the objective of using education to create a new generation of Chinese who
will contribute to the larger, collective, goals of “new China.”
Recently, studying how such “core” cultural assumptions that guide the
behaviors of the majority of people in a given nation—as did the “culture
and personality” school of the 1940s—have become highly contentious, pro-
voking criticism that such a study cannot account for diversity within a pop-
ulation, sociocultural changes overtime, or the possibility of such cultural
norms created by the “privileged few” to control the masses. But to throw
away such basic “cultural models” altogether, as some cognitive and psycho-

266 May 2009

 MODERATED DISCUSSION

logical anthropologists warn (e.g., Strauss and Quinn 1997), is to throw out
the baby with the bath water. This would be a serious loss, as Tobin’s dia-
chronic historical study shows how important such cultural meaning systems
are for the operation of preschools in the three cultures.
Such are core propositions without which a teacher cannot even begin
to teach nor can an administrator or parent conceive what it means to “ed-
ucate” a child. For example, to say, “Let’s go and get a hamburger for lunch”
assumes that it is morally and aesthetically acceptable to eat beef. Similarly,
for educational researchers to say, “Let’s study student motivation,” it must
be assumed that there exists such a thing as “motivation” and that there are
different levels and types of motivation, which are supposed to relate to these
researchers’ research goals. These basic theories about reality, however, are
not necessarily as universal as commonly assumed by Western educational
and psychological researchers.
Tobin’s multivocal, visual approach “digs out” such unconscious materials
as the researchers move back and forth between the interpretive frames of
cultural insiders and outsiders and fill this gap with contextual materials that
are so rich that there’s no denying the power of indigenous cultural meaning
systems motivating and justifying the actors’ behaviors. Few people studied
such meaning systems so systematically, effectively, and thoroughly until Tobin
and others did their first study and further shifted it to a new, higher level
with their new study. Yet this approach is replicated by only a handful of
researchers. It should become a mainstream method in the comparative study
of education.

GITA STEINER-KHAMSI

Over and over again, Joseph Tobin and his colleagues remind us in Preschool
in Three Cultures (1989) and in its sequel, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited
(forthcoming, 2009), that the 20-minute video clips do not represent typical
cases of preschools in China, Japan, and the United States but, rather, served
the research team as a medium for their “video-cued multivocal ethnography.”
Despite all precautions, there is an authoritative value attached to people’s
authentic speech and action that makes us want to know whether these
manifestations of authenticity are in any way representative of a larger uni-
verse. The desire to know more about the sample selection is not to be
belittled, for there are too many researchers who unreflectively select excerpts
from participant observation, interviews, open-ended questions, or video clips
merely to make a case for their own preconceived judgments. By not spec-
ifying what an excerpt or a clip stands for, they imply the existence of a larger
universe of opinions that is presumably represented in their selection. Au-
thenticity has a silencing effect on readers and viewers. The video clips in
this ethnography, on the contrary, are authentic and yet give us and other

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viewers a voice to talk back; in fact, this is precisely what they were produced
for.
There are two distinct methodological characteristics that make this work
ingenious and set it apart from other ethnographies on schooling and other
cross-national studies. Tobin and his colleagues engage in cross-cultural com-
parison without anthropological shame and at the same time masterfully
tackle the problem of spatial determinism that is endemic to ethnographies.
First, in all the six settings (two preschools per country) the same issues or
critical incidents—previously identified as key issues in preschools—were
filmed to ensure comparability: classroom routines, separation, fighting, mis-
behavior, mixed-aged play, and intimacy between teachers and children, and,
presenting them as cues to stimulate a response, the informants were “forced”
to take a stance on these key issues. Arguably, comparative studies tend to
rest to a great extent on forced-response data, which creates a validity prob-
lem: the universe of possible responses is drastically reduced for the sake of
comparability. This is not the case in this methodological masterpiece, be-
cause the material is used to open up rather than to narrow down interpre-
tation. The forced-response feature of the study enables a contextual com-
parison but, combined with the self-reported accounts of the informants
(“What would you do in this situation?”), considerably increases the validity
of this comparative study. Thereby researcher bias is minimized, yet made
transparent and thoroughly reflected throughout the ethnography. Second,
a compelling feature of the sequel is the selection of an additional preschool
in each country that teachers in that country find innovative. Thus, the second
ethnography of 2009 comprises not only video cues from the same three
preschools that were filmed 20 years earlier but also from three new ones
that teachers consider, to use Jürgen Schriewer’s terminology, as “reference”
preschools: preschools that other practitioners regard as exemplars of “best
practices” and find worth emulating. Even though the answer to this question
heavily depends on who is asking—an American researcher, a trained prac-
titioner, a Buddhist monk, a concerned mother, an international donor,
and so forth—the question of what practitioners consider a “good” school
is very important in order to understand pedagogical belief systems (but
not practices).
At the risk of adding merely another voice (with a sample size of one)
to a sophisticated study, I would like to interject my own interpretation of
the fascinating video material: the classroom in the U.S. preschool in Alham-
bra is teacher-led and task oriented, whereas the one in the Sinan Road
Preschool in Shanghai is student-centered and playful. Either the No Child
Left Behind policy completely revamped the way teachers give preschool or
we are victims of the cliché that preschools in the United States are child-
centered and value individualism more than anywhere else in this world. The
literacy lesson in Alhambra (United States), filmed in 2004, reminded me of

268 May 2009

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the highly structured block play activity at Daguan (China), documented in

the first ethnography 20 years ago. No matter how we bend it, preschools
from Alhambra to Shanghai are not converging in practice even though
perhaps the belief of what “good” preschool teaching entails has become
remarkably similar. These are not matters of nuances or “loose coupling”
between belief and action. The new ethnography breaks new ground in terms
of methodology, preschool research, and also globalization studies in
education.

Question 2: In viewing the new video clips and reading the analyses of
them provided by Tobin and his colleagues (in the excerpts from the forth-
coming book), what struck you as significant or problematic?

SUSAN D. HOLLOWAY

I am intrigued by Tobin’s stance on the important issue of globalization versus

national distinctiveness. In the original volume and the sequel, he uses nation
as the primary level of analysis and emphasizes cross-national differences over
similarities. While the original was primarily attentive to international differ-
ences in cultural values, the sequel brings a more explicit focus on institu-
tional forces and structures that give rise to—and respond to—cultural norms
within each country. The effects of federal education policy, for example, are
explicitly dealt with in the recent footage from the United States, while the
low birth rate is a focus in the segment on Japan. Tobin conceptualizes
structural forces as exerting a more or less consistent effect on beliefs and
activities in schools within the nation, as opposed to focusing on variable
responses by local institutions. Thus, his argument, based on what I can glean
from the excerpts, is that there is a particular national response to globally
circulating views about children and their education. In addition, he argues
that there are certain implicit cultural norms that are resistant to change
and hence continue to reinforce national distinctiveness. This nuanced po-
sition will be of considerable interest to scholars on all sides of the ongoing
debate about globalization in a postmodern context.
I found the filmed segments from the Japanese settings to be very pro-
vocative and can’t wait to incorporate this new material into my courses. The
clips raise in a vivid and concrete way some of our field’s enduring challenges.
I reacted strongly to the Japanese scene in which three girls combine forces
in a physical fight against a fourth girl who is a relative newcomer to the
class. Tobin argues that the teacher purposely watches from the sidelines to
allow the girls to resolve the problem on their own (machi no hoiku). I was
surprised to read that the Japanese participants mostly supported this hands-
off policy. In my research, I found that many Japanese teachers thought it
was important to help children—including the “victim”—verbalize their

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thoughts and feelings during a dispute and to prevent bullying. The teacher
looked harried as she straightened up the classroom, and I wondered whether
she was just too overwhelmed with other obligations to intervene with these
girls and then drew on a culturally sanctioned model to justify her (in)action.
In other words, when can we be sure that a cultural model such as machi no
hoiku is actually the causal force behind a teacher’s behavior?
Viewing the clips also reminded me of the challenge of disentangling the
appearance of change over time from that of intranational variability. How
can we be sure that teachers’ approaches have changed, when we may actually
be seeing responses that were always available but were not the focus of earlier
analyses? And how can we document the interaction between change in
student behavior brought about by shifts in social conditions outside the
classroom and responsive changes in teachers’ practices? The task of docu-
menting change, contestation, and variability reveals itself to be complex
indeed. Tobin’s new volume promises to become a valuable resource as our
field grapples with these challenging questions.

CATHERINE LEWIS

In looking across the snapshots of preschool practice from three cultures

and two time periods, I am struck with one area of enormous continuity: the
emphasis on the peer group as educator in the Japanese preschools. Across
two decades of fights at Komatsudani Preschool, teachers mimamoru (watch
and wait) while students work out means to deal with an immature classmate.
At Madoka Preschool, Kaizawa-sensei persistently questions two boys until
one admits that he initiated a hair-pulling incident. The commonality of the
nonintervention and intervention at Madoka Preschool is the teachers’ idea
that children socialize one another and must ultimately develop the capacity
to nurture and discipline one another. The teacher engineers the experiences
that students need to develop that capacity, including conflict, and steps in
at dangerous moments or to introduce ideas children might not easily see
on their own. So, for example, Kaizawa-sensei introduces the idea that lying
is worse than pulling hair. She draws on her own experience, explaining how
she apologized to a friend, fessing up when she did something unkind. I am
struck by how much this emphasis on peer group as socializer fits with recent
sociobiological thinking. Steven Pinker argues that “children everywhere are
socialized by their peer group, not by their parents. . . . Weary parents know
they are no match for a child’s peers, and rightly obsess over the best neigh-
borhood in which to bring their children up. . . . And as far as reproduction
is concerned, the home is a dead end. The child will have to compete for
mates, and before that, for the status necessary to find and keep them, in
other arenas, which play by different rules. The child had better master them”
(Pinker 1997, 450).

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HIDETADA SHIMIZU

As a native of Japan, and a long-time resident of the United States, I was

intrigued to find those aspects of Tobin’s video clips and discussion that point
to cultural continuity and resiliency. These culturally organized ideas about
preschool education seem to be so enduring in Japan, the United States, and
China, in spite of the time lapse between the two studies.
In the case of Japan, I see the following basic logic operating in the
teacher behaviors: two contradictory elements go together. Things come in
pairs, such as soto (outside) and uchi (inside), tatemae (the way things are
generally supposed to be) and honne (the truth about a person’s intention
and its intended outcome). Although they are separate and seeming mutually
incompatible, they in fact support each other and generate insights and
behaviors that are rooted in “wisdom” specific to each and every human
situation.
Such “knowledge” is not merely theoretical or ideological: everyone must
and can only learn it through direct experience, as Tobin points out. So when
a fight breaks out among a group of girls at Komatsudani, Morita-sensei’s
goal is not to impose certain ideological and moral precepts to the children
but to encourage the children themselves to emulate her approach to life’s
problems. Hence, she first chooses not to show (this, concealing her true
intention, is her soto and tatemae) that she is concerned with the girls’ fight
(this is her uchi and honne). She wants to make sure that the girls experience
the fight but doesn’t want them to get hurt. But when the fight seems to get
too aggressive, she intervenes by saying, “Hey, hey” (kora kora). In fact, the
girls are controlled by Morita-sensei. Since she’s not stopping the fight, they
are stuck with the situation. It is their responsibility to learn how to clean up
the mess they created for themselves.
The U.S. approach looks diametrically opposite to the Japanese approach.
It is much more dualistic, ideological, and political than the Japanese coun-
terpart. What drives the U.S. teachers’ and administrators’ view on education
is their unequivocal and rugged sense of egocentricity. Fran says, for example,
that while her colleague Bonnie wants to puts emphasis on teaching concrete
academic skills (phonics), she is “determined to hold out and stay true to
the child-centered, play-oriented beliefs and principles she was introduced
to when she entered the field.” Her statement strikes me as being very self-
centered, as opposed to child-centered: she acts as if she is standing solely
on her own feet, asserting what she thinks is best from her own perspective.
When she is asked the question, “Is the preschool curriculum changing?”
she responds by saying, “well, they’re trying to change me.” I imagined how
inappropriate a response like this would be in the Japanese setting: to pay
attention to yourself more than others, particularly the children you teach.
What is striking about the Chinese case is the abruptness and compre-

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hensiveness of the changes that are taking place. Historically, Japan has
adopted ideas taken from the East as well as from West. After the initial
importation period, however, Japan has almost always taken time to “Japanize”
the foreign materials, so that most of these imported ideas and practices have
dual structures with foreign appearances and indigenous contents. I got the
sense that the changes taking place in China, which I call nondualistic, are
qualitatively different from the Japanese example. Rather, the Chinese ex-
ample looks like a case of, for a lack of a better term, collective individualism.
On the surface, the adoption of a student-centered, individualized approach
is truly impressive; the Chinese teachers seem much more systematic and
rigorous pedagogically than the Japanese, who use a “non-intervention” ap-
proach. Herein lies what appears to distinguish the Chinese case from its
Japanese and U.S. counterparts: it is a collectivistic thrust to educate children
by individualized education principles. This certainly is different from having
to teach each student according to his/her own ability level. Rather, receiving
individualized education is the pathway to functioning as a citizen in Shang-
hai’s (and China’s) new economy and new society.

GITA STEINER-KHAMSI

The video clip from the classroom at the Sinan Road Preschool in Shanghai
is a good case in point to illustrate the kind of grand questions that the
ethnography evokes. In line with the method of inquiry used in the ethnog-
raphy by Tobin and his colleagues (analyzing the viewers’ responses to the
video clips), I will describe what I saw and interpreted in the video clip in
the classroom of the teachers Cheng and Wang at the preschool in Shanghai.
It is important to point out that this particular classroom was identified (by
interviewed teachers and community members) as innovative, reflecting new
directions in early childhood education in China. This is why the second
ethnography, the 2009 sequel of the previous study, leaves me, in a positive
sense, puzzled:
I see a preschool teacher sitting and soon after laying in a play corner of a preschool
classroom pretending that she is a sick child. Small children dressed up in different
professional outfits, from medical doctors to policemen, carry on with their own
play. The teacher draws attention by making disgraceful and loud noises. Several
children, led by the doctor, bend over her, touch her head, diagnose and finally
remedy her sickness. In another scene, a boy and a girl get into a fight over a
comb. The girl seems to be the chief hairdresser and the boy her unruly assistant.
The teacher is called upon but does not interfere. The fight gets worse, leading
the policeman to threaten the culprit with an arrest unless he returns the comb.
The sociodramatic play ends with the teacher convening the children in a circle.
She makes the children speak about the fight between the hairdresser and her
assistant.

This happened in a Chinese preschool? Keeping in mind that Tobin and

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his colleagues do not claim to have filmed typical cases, I was nevertheless
irritated by the following: (1) a Chinese teacher actively participates in chil-
dren’s play, infantilizes herself, and engages in role reversal (playing a helpless
and dependent person); (2) a Chinese teacher leaves problems unresolved,
that is, does not interfere in a children’s fight even though the children
clearly expect her to take action. Ironically, what gave me comfort was to see
that the gender roles still play out in this Chinese preschool: boys wear
weapons and transgress and adopt the roles of doctors and policemen. Girls,
on the other hand, are hairdressers and conflict managers. They ask first for
the teacher and then, when their appeal fails, for the police to end the fight.
Admittedly, I have the Mongolian and Tibetan context in mind, where it is
inconceivable to touch someone’s head or feet, especially of individuals, such
as teachers, who are revered. Also, stratification by age is in this part of the
world more pronounced than any other social category, including gender
and class. Therefore, my curiosity was stretched tremendously by reading and
viewing the material: why and how have the professional beliefs of this teacher
changed to make her lower herself to the status of a child? What does this
new professional role stand for in the bigger context of social change?
In his thought-provoking Presidential CIES Address of 2006, Martin Car-
noy made it clear, and in fact made us feel bad, that many comparative and
international education researchers do not have a theory of the state in mind
when explaining educational development. The 2009 ethnography by Tobin
and his colleagues made me realize that we do not have a theory of the
school either. What society is to schools is understudied, as Carnoy contends,
but what school is to society is even less investigated. The question brings to
light a conceptual black hole in educational research. What are schools to
society: a microsociety reflecting the existing structure and values of society,
an avant-garde breaking with traditions and instead propagating new values,
or a protected space in between for experimenting with cultural values, pos-
sibly imported from elsewhere or from the absent Other (globalization)?
Tobin and colleagues insist that the video clips are not the actual data but
only video cues or stimuli to trigger a dialogue and reflection. They certainly
achieved the goal when I viewed and read this brilliant piece of work.

LYNN PAINE

Watching the many teacher-student interactions and reading teachers’ ex-

planations of their decisions and actions, I am struck (again) by how complex
and demanding the work of teachers is. Where do these teachers get the
ideas they have? The book raises fascinating questions for us about the ways
in which the knowledge of these preschool educators is complex and involves
judgment, wisdom of practice, and abstract concepts. The authors paint a
compelling picture. For example, the Japanese teachers’ knowledge of the

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importance of the strategy of mimamoru (of observing and “standing guard”)

and the approach of machi no hoiku (caring for children by waiting) is not
easily or quickly grasped nor is it part of lay practices that parents would
employ. It requires experience and learning. I am very curious about how
the knowledge of these Japanese teachers, or their Chinese or U.S. coun-
terparts in the book, is developed. I also wonder, given the powerful expla-
nation of culture the book provides, how the teachers who speak here—as
those observed or those observing and commenting on others—reflect what
Anderson-Levitt (2002) describes as national teaching cultures and trans-
national professional cultures.
In noticing other intriguing puzzles, this time ones within one culture
rather than across the three countries, I found the contrast between Daguan
in 1984 and today stark in many ways. Videotape perhaps heightens the
contrast of then and now, as the material changes—more objects, more var-
iation in objects, more range of materials in use, more colorful objects, and
so on—jump off the screen. These material changes are, from my own per-
spective, important ones. Similarly notable, but far more complicated in my
mind, is what seems to be an opening up in the play, the less teacher-directed
classroom, and the apparent decrease in regulation. But here I was eager to
know more, especially as I watched the Daguan students, right before they
moved into the block room, sitting quietly at tables, listening to the teacher
giving directions. When comparative work so often produces efforts at con-
trast, the tendency is to ignore the continuity. This new book is exciting for
its ability to help us see how, in this case, the Chinese classroom may be
“both/and,” not “either/or.” The book’s commentary that pushes away from
easy conclusions and definitive claims about linear movement and change is
significant for its insight.
The reform movements in elementary and secondary education in China
have emphasized pedagogical and curricular shifts that are intended to put
students at the center of learning and to encourage more independent,
creative, and active learning. The shifts that Daguan has witnessed since 1984
therefore are ones that may reflect how preschools are linked to a vision of
education more generally. This raises a question about how policy intersects
with and affects culture. What isn’t clear is how much the changes in pre-
school education in China reflect not only larger changes in educational
visions of good schooling but also an increasing encroachment of formal
schooling into the lives of young children.
I was struck by how changes in resources don’t somehow erase what seems
like a strongly Chinese approach to education. Yes, one classroom (Sinan)
has strong elements of what we might think of as Deweyian influences. But
both 2002 classrooms teachers’ actions and comments evoke the notions that
what is going on is important, that teachers are trying to get “it” right, and
overall a seriousness of purpose, one that seems shared, at least by the teachers

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who were working together in the same school. The discussion of the Al-
hambra School provided a striking contrast. While they too assume that what
is going on is “important,” the teacher and director in the same building
clearly disagree about what the goals and strategies should be. Although the
Chinese strategies change (even with the Sinan teachers critiquing their own
practice as now outdated), there seemed to be common agreement among
teachers working together about what the goal is and how best to achieve it.
This impression of some perhaps “cultural” ideas (about teaching as public
practice with shared ideas) in China makes me wonder how much contention
and debate there is among Chinese practitioners and to what extent that
also reflects some change or continuity.

Final question: What Did You Find Especially Interesting about the Com-
ments Expressed by Others in Response to the First Two Questions?

SUSAN D. HOLLOWAY

First, I was struck by how tempting it was for the commentators to remark
on what the clips illustrated about national trends in each country, even as
we acknowledged that they were not necessarily representative of the nation
in which they were filmed. As Gita Steiner-Khamsi wrote in her commentary,
these evocative clips hold “authoritative value attached to people’s authentic
speech and action.” In contrast to the vivid and compelling clips, the viewers
of the clips—supposedly the source of “real” data—remained in the shadows,
virtually absent from our commentaries. How can future work with the multi-
vocal video ethnographic technique find ways to sharpen the salience of these
viewers so that their opinions rather than the stimuli are the focus of the
discussion?
Several commentators ask the question articulated by Lynn Paine in her
essay, namely, “Where do these teachers get the ideas they have?” In our
commentaries, we attributed teachers’ actions to cultural models and na-
tional-level education policies as well as to economic and political structures.
This proves to be an intriguing but ultimately speculative approach to de-
veloping causal models. How can the methodology pioneered by Tobin and
colleagues help us move forward with solid empirical work that examines
causal connections? One suggestion would be to contrast the reactions of
viewers who differ along a causal dimension of interest. For example, a re-
searcher interested in the role of religious beliefs in shaping teacher practices
could not only create clips of schools representing a variety of denominations
but also compare responses to those clips of viewers who were themselves
variously affiliated with religious communities.
And relatedly, I wonder how to understand more fully the meaning of
comments by those viewers who are not cultural insiders. For example, com-

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mentator Hide Shimizu’s “insider” interpretation of the Japanese clips is a

deep way to understand Japanese teaching. But non-Japanese viewers would
not have heard of such concepts as tatemae and honne and would not be
evaluating the clips with Japanese cultural models in mind. The value of the
“outsider” viewers derives not from what we learn from them about teachers
in the foreign schools featured in the clip but rather what they say about the
viewer’s own community of practice. In other words, comments by Chinese
viewers on Japanese schools are more relevant to the section on Chinese
early childhood practices than to the one on Japan.

CATHERINE LEWIS

I was intrigued by the contrast Lynn Paine noted between the Daguan ed-
ucators, who are “trying to get ‘it’ right,” and the Alhambra educators: “While
they too assume that what is going on is important, the teacher and director
in the same building clearly disagree about what the goals and strategies should
be.” How important is it for educators within a school to forge a shared set of
goals and approaches? Research suggests that U.S. schools differ substantially
on whether matters such as teaching approach and discipline are collectively
negotiated or up to individual teachers’ judgment (Westheimer 1998).
In Japanese preschools as well as elementary schools, teachers’ profes-
sional development often begins with teachers collectively asking the ques-
tion: “What kind of children would we like to raise at this school?” (Lewis
2002; Fernandez and Yoshida 2004) and forging a shared set of goals in
answer. Several times a year one or more classrooms open up their practice
to “lesson research” (in preschools, it is often called “caregiving research”)
in which fellow teachers observe student learning and activity in detail, typ-
ically making a running record of student behavior that they later present
during a colloquium of the whole faculty. The teachers use this common
observational “text” to examine their progress toward their long-term goals
for students (Lewis and Tsuchida 1998; Fernandez and Yoshida 2004).
I am struck by the image of the Alhambra teachers’ disagreement over
goals and strategies—not so much the fact of their disagreement (for such
disagreements probably occur in all three cultures) but by their apparent
comfort with their disagreement. The qualities that will shape children’s
future lives—such as motivation, learning habits, and prosocial commit-
ments—develop over many years, in interactions with many teachers. When
teachers do not try to negotiate shared goals and approaches, do they miss
an important opportunity for coherent impact on these aspects of develop-
ment? When should we privilege the teacher’s right to a personal educational
philosophy and when the child’s right to a coherent environment?

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LYNN PAINE

I am struck by what seems like shared and strong enthusiasm for what this
new book offers us, both substantively and methodologically. Within this quite
striking appreciation for the book’s many contributions to our thinking, three
issues emerged for me as I read the thoughtful comments of my colleagues.
Our comments suggest that we were drawn to noticing change, especially
in China. I’ve been puzzling about how much this reflects something about
the comparatively more significant or dramatic changes in Chinese preschool
practices than in those of the other two country cases and how much, on
the other hand, it might reflect our own knowledge of the other settings,
the casting of the discussion by the book’s authors, or something else. As a
group of discussants, we include more of us with long and, in some cases,
insider knowledge of Japanese and U.S. education than we do of Chinese
education. While I am not in a position to answer this question that I’m
playing with, I am wondering about how one is quicker to see change in the
less familiar setting than in the place(s) one knows in more nuanced ways.
That we all noticed profound changes in the Chinese preschools is not sur-
prising to me, and I don’t see our noting these changes as simply an artifact
of our individual and collective expertise. But I am intrigued by how we did
not have as strong a reaction to, nor choose to discuss as frequently in our
remarks, changes in U.S. and Japanese preschools. And just as I (perhaps
reflecting my own biases) noticed how prominent were comments about the
Chinese preschools, I perceived a rather muted reaction to the book and
video portrayals of U.S. preschools. Compared to our responses to the Chi-
nese and Japanese schools, we tended to write less about the U.S. classrooms,
either in terms of change or continuity. How might we account for this?
Whatever the reason, I do worry about the ways in which our comments
somehow take a book that tries hard to treat each of the three countries with
some parity and reduce it to one which gives us insight about two “other”
countries—Japan and China. That leaves the United States in some privileged,
unexamined space (or leaves the book and video’s treatment of the United
States as some unexamined referent).
Susan Holloway’s discussion of the “challenge of disentangling the ap-
pearance of change over time from that of intranational variability” seems
helpful as we think about both the methodological contributions of this book
and questions it raises for us. Tobin’s book does not seek to address Holloway’s
question, but it helps push it onto the agenda for discussion while avoiding
the too simple dichotomies of large-scale and small-scale work, cross-sectional
and longitudinal, and so on.
Finally, Hidetada Shimizu’s notion of collective-individualism, as an effort
to capture the features of a contemporary Chinese pedagogical orientation,
is a fascinating one. It would be exciting to engage Chinese educators and

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Chinese scholars of education in conversation about how such a construct

helps us to understand schooling in a society that now defies easy categori-
zation. Just as Tyack and Cuban (1995) have argued that the “grammar of
schooling” is important to understand the pulls of tradition and the resistance
to change (in this case, in U.S. education), so collective-individualism reminds
me of the importance Chinese practitioners and policy makers give to the
metaphors, slogans, and academic terms meant to characterize educational
practice. As practices in China are undergoing shifts, so too has there continued
to be a searching for apt phrasing that can guide such work, set terms for the
discussion, and alert educators and the public to goals and philosophies.

HIDETADA SHIMIZU

One thing that stood out for me was Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s comment, “many
comparative and international education researchers do not have a theory
of the state . . . [nor] a theory of the school . . . [which] brings to light a
conceptual black hole in educational research.” I would like to suggest a
possible conceptual framework to fill this “hole in a doughnut”: that is, teach-
ers’ culturally constituted sense of self (Hallowell 1955) as a missing link
between school and society. In his essay entitled “Japanese Preschool and the
Pedagogy of Selfhood,” Tobin (1992), citing Takeo Doi’s (1986) ethnopsy-
chological exploration of Japanese sense of self—notes, “the Japanese self is
two-tiered, with omote and ura dimensions. Omote is the front side of the self,
the side of self one shows in public; ura is the private side of the self, the
side one shows only to family and friends” (23). In my previous comment, I
noted that the essential role this twofold structure of consciousness plays in
the Japanese teachers’ approach to dealing with children’s disputes. I linked
this observation with Tobin’s assertion that culturally experiential knowledge
such as this cannot simply be learned through the formal curriculum of a
teacher training institution. Rather, one learns it while growing up to “become
a Japanese” (e.g., Hendry 1986)—as one develops a culturally appropriate
sense of self.
Lynn Paine noted, “many teacher-student interactions and . . . teachers’
explanations of their decisions and actions . . . [are] complex and [so]
demanding” that it made her wonder, “Where do these teachers get the ideas
they have?” Likewise, Catherine Lewis questioned why American teachers
were not concerned when overtly disagreeing with their colleagues (this
would certainly be avoided by Japanese teachers at least publicly, if not pri-
vately). I would suggest that such behaviors emerge in part as a function of
“cultural psychodynamics” (LeVine 2001, xix) of teachers’ culturally nor-
mative and divergent sense of self: that it simply “feels right” to teach in
certain ways as a fully acculturated member of a society. Although no policy
maker or administrator demanded such an approach, doing so psychically

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equilibrates (or disequilibrates, depending on individual disposition) the

teachers’ internal sense of normative self and the institutional demand made
upon their roles by their respective society. I would argue that the cultural
psychology of the teachers’ sense of the self and their teaching practices are
not separable in this sense—“two but not two”—as a Zen master would say
(Suzuki 2001). To ignore this sense of self would be like trying to understand
Hamlet (teaching) without the Prince of Denmark (self) (Spiro 1994, 162).
However much we try to ignore this theoretical problem, if not a theory, it
would seem to keep on bouncing back upon us as “the return of the repressed.”

GITA STEINER-KHAMSI

Only after having read the commentaries of my colleagues did I realize how
differentiated Tobin’s responses have been to his research question, which
invites us to examine continuity and change in preschools in three cultures.
Preoccupied with the brilliant method of inquiry that Tobin and his associates
applied to obtain spontaneous, honest, and nonstereotypical accounts of
preschool practices, I perhaps neglected the relevance of Tobin’s research
question. Until I read what others have commented upon, the emphasis on
continuity and change was secondary in my assessment of the book. Under-
standing the method of video-cued multivocal ethnography, introduced in
the 1989 book and developed to perfection in the sequel, has been for me
a sufficient reason to read the book in my classes.
Since we have not read the sequel book in full, we seem to speculate in
our commentaries on how much continuity versus change there has been in
the video clips that we saw, and several of us wonder what the causes for
change were. Catherine Lewis (a lot of change) and Hidetada Shimizu (a lot
of continuity) seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, and the rest of
us situate ourselves somewhere in the middle. Susan Holloway makes an
interesting observation in her commentary that directly relates to globali-
zation studies in education: she draws attention to the “particular national
response[s] to globally circulating views about children and their education.”
Whether we use sociological concepts of path dependency or anthropological
concepts that emphasize cultural meanings attached to global discourses, the
question is, in my opinion, not only what practices are resistant to change
(and, more often than not are by a problematic act of subtraction retroactively
interpreted as “cultural core beliefs”) but also how practitioners and experts
from the countries in question explain and justify change and to what they,
in their own words, attribute the causes for change. Do they make references
to experiences in other countries, or are they self-referential? Do they resort
to “globalization,” “international developments in preschool education,” or
other, self-induced, quasi-external sources of authority to make an argument
for why change was necessary in their own country context? In other words,

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I find the transnational or international comparative dimension underlying

national responses particularly interesting. It remains to be seen whether the
sequel book addresses the “semantics of globalization” ( Jürgen Schriewer)
that is increasingly used nationally and locally to accelerate and justify change
in national settings.
Reading the commentaries from renowned area specialists and anthro-
pologists, I learned a great deal about Japanese and Chinese preschool prac-
tices. Why is it that we read and know more about Japanese, Chinese, and
other preschool practices than about cultural practices in U.S. preschools?
Is this perhaps a bias in the Anglophone academic publishing industry, in
that many more books are published by American scholars who write about
education in other countries than by non-American scholars and ethnogra-
phers reflecting on cultural patterns in U.S. education?

CLOSING COMMENTS

JOSEPH TOBIN

There is so much to engage with in these comments and so little space to

do so that rather than attempt to respond to specific points, I would like to
share some reflections on the process of having our new book serve as the
focal point for this moderated discussion. I am pleased that the format here
has worked so well to mirror the spirit of the Preschool in Three Cultures project.
The analyses, critiques, and questions raised here complement and extend
the books’ multivocal, dialogic approach to meaning making.
As in the Preschools in Three Cultures books, there is a Rashomon quality to
these comments—five readers read the same excerpts differently, the differ-
ences widening and deepening our understanding of the project while at
the same time revealing something of each viewer’s knowledge, concerns,
and beliefs. The five commentators here read the video clips and text excerpts
posted on the CER Web site from the perspective of their areas of professional
interest and expertise: Susan Holloway focuses on variations of practice and
ideology within nations and on structural as opposed to cultural explanations;
Catherine Lewis on the study of mechanisms of teacher growth and change;
Gita Steiner-Khamsi on local responses to globalization and method issues
in comparative ethnography; Lynn Paine on the cultural and social contexts
of teacher beliefs; and Hidetada Shimizu on cultural differences in psycho-
social development. I find the variation in these responses heartening because
it suggests that the new project is succeeding in putting into play a variety
of issues and perspectives that work to provoke a never-ending cycle of per-
ceptive and provocative responses. How much richer is a five-person series
of comments than a single review!
The comments of these five scholars add depth and complexity to the

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project, extending the multivocality and reiterative character of the project,

which at heart is a conversation without end—each time someone watches
the video or reads the book and reacts, the process starts up anew. I think
of this spirit of the project as Bakhtinian in several senses. It is multivocal,
dialogic, and chronotopic (contextualizing utterances in time and space),
and rhetorically the books are constructed in a way that depends on readers
to complete the meaning of the text, a process Bakhtin describes as a cycle
of “consummativity” and “answerability.” Bakhtin argues that we cannot con-
summate (complete or fix the meanings of) our own utterances; only others
can do so for us, by making meaning out of what we have said or written
(or videotaped) and then responding, as these five commentators have done,
consummating (for the moment) some of the utterances in our book and
images in our videos and providing us all with new opportunities to listen,
reflect, and answer back, keeping the conversation going.

PARTICIPANTS

Susan D. Holloway (s_hollo@berkeley.edu) is a faculty member in the Grad-

uate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her
work focuses on family and schooling in Japan and the United States.
She is particularly interested in identifying structural and interpersonal
conditions that help women develop a sense of agency in the role of
parent. Her work on Japan includes a book entitled Contested Childhood:
Diversity and Change in Japanese Preschools, which was published by Rout-
ledge in 2000.
Catherine Lewis (clewis@mills.edu), PhD, is a senior research scholar at Mills
College in Oakland, California, and principal investigator on projects
funded by the National Science Foundation and federal Department of
Education. Her publications and videotapes on Japanese lesson study
can be found at http://www.lessonresearch.net.
Lynn Paine (lpaine@hbs.edu) is professor of teacher education at Michigan
State University. Her scholarly interests focus on teaching and teacher
learning understood in their social and cultural contexts. She has studied
teacher education, teacher induction, and mentoring in China and
elsewhere.
Hidetada Shimizu (shimizu@niu.edu) is associate professor of educational
psychology and foundations of education at Northern Illinois University.
His research interests include acculturation of individuals, cultural in-
fluences on personality and behavioral development, cultural phenom-
enology of self, and Burakumin minority experiences in Japan. He was
primary researcher in the Case Study Project of the 1995 Third Inter-

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national Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). His work on Japan

includes a coedited book (with Robert LeVine) entitled Japanese Frames
of Mind: Cultural Perspectives on Human Development (Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
Gita Steiner-Khamsi (gs174@columbia.edu) is professor of comparative and
international education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New
York. Her research areas include transnational policy borrowing/lend-
ing, education and development, multiple case-study methodology, and
comparative methods. Her most recent coedited book is titled South-
South Cooperation in Education and Development (with Linda Chisholm;
published in 2009 by Teachers College Press and HSRC Press). She is
the 2009 president of the Comparative and International Education
Society.
Joseph Tobin ( Joseph.Tobin@asu.edu) is a professor in the College of Ed-
ucation at Arizona State University. He has formerly served as a professor
in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii and as a visiting
professor in human development at the University of Chicago. His re-
search interests include educational ethnography, Japanese culture and
education, visual anthropology, early childhood education, and children
and the media. His publications include Preschool in Three Cultures (Yale
University Press, 1989) and others on early childhood education and
classroom ethnography. He serves as a member of the National Research
Council’s Board on International Comparative Studies in Education.
Tobin received a PhD in human development from the University of
Chicago.

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