Content area
Full Text
PRESCHOOL IN THREE CULTURES REVISITED: China, Japan and the United States. By Joseph Jay Tobin, Yeh Hsueh and Mayumi Karasawa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xiii. 265 pp. (B&W photos.) US$39.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-226-80503-0.
In 1990, I reviewed Tobin, Wu and Davidson's Preschool in Three Cultures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), the volume that laid out the first study of Chinese, Japanese and American early childhood education. The multivocal, multi-sited comparative ethnographic perspective was new and, as I noted, very suggestive. With the current volume, an even more suggestive text, the potential for what I have come to call the "Tobin Method" seems even more promising, if far more complicated.
Video is an important aspect of the method. In the original study, three preschools, one each in China, Japan and the United States, were documented with very interesting use of video as part of the study itself. In the first study, the authors taped episodes in classrooms, screened them for teachers and other audiences in the three countries, and incorporated the viewpoints of participants on their own classrooms as well as on the classrooms of the other schools. This "Rashomon" technique produced a rich commentary...