Pedagogies of Self in American and Japanese Early Childhood Education: A Critical Conceptual Analysis

Recognizing that early childhood education in the United States has been influenced deeply by notions of developmentally appropriate practice, this critical conceptual analysis of early education discourse in the United States and Japan contrasts the cultural assumptions and views of self that inform early childhood education discourse in each context. Although early childhood education in Japan can be characterized as highly progressive and child centered, at the same time it is not developmentalist and it envisions the self principally in terms of culturally valued qualities of personhood. In contrast, discourses on the self in the United States emphasize a construct of the individual child defined with an emphasis on differences across discrete developmental domains, in which the "whole child" is essentially lost. The critique also considers how child development expertise contributes to emotional impoverishment in teachers' relations with children as well as to inaccuracies of educators' self-perception in work with children.