Tobin, Joseph, J. and David Y.H. Wu, Dana H. Davidson Preschool in three cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1989
This is the ninth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5016 "Ethnography of Education"
  1. The quasi-universality of schooling -- issues of empire, colonialism, and the authority of the specialists
    1. China and the examination system
    2. the training of priests and religious specialists
    3. the training of scholars
  2. "Local" developments
    1. governmental policies about school organization and control
    2. "customs" that may not be controlled panoptically but can be brought to meta-discursive awareness (discourses about everyday discourses)--i.e. "common sense" about the way children are, or what children can do
    3. discourses about "what is good" and "what is bad" about "our schools"
      1. the issue of discursive awareness in relation to everyday practices (vs. Bourdieu on habitus)
  3. interesting questions about the practices of ideology (what practice demonstrates adherence to an ideology or "national character")
    1. individualism and control
    2. child welfare and what children can be let do
    3. child development and what is appropriate for children of various ages
      1. ignorance of Developmental Psychology (as research discipline) or limitations of the ways of knowing of Developmental Psychology that produces new ignorance about the development of the psyche? Not an idle question given the hegemony of developmental psychology in school policy.
  4. Methodological note

    1. not controlled comparison to evaluate the value of various variables, but comparison to highlight possibilities within broader structures (and then the patterning of local structure -- thus "culture")
      1. lingering positivism about "typicality"
      2. not only "observation" and then "interpretation/representation" (the usual ethnographic progression) but interpretations/representations of "observations of interpretation/representations" (people talking about their practices in the light of what they are being shown of other people's practices);
        1. a quasi-experimental design (not in the technical sense) to trigger participants' discourse about their own common sense practices.
          1. this raises fundamental questions about meta-linguistic awareness of cultural practices: are these dependent on forms of habitus (internalized dispositions developed from experiences within organized, structured, fields) or on the availability of certain meta-pragmatic settings where one can practice about practices (i.e. discuss, develop, and rationalize "policies")
Some questions
StudyPlace conversation