In 1982 I began using classroom videos as cues for ethnographic interviews. My colleagues and I asked practitioners in three countries to respond to videos shot in their own and each other's preschools. The video cues worked to produce conversations that we used in our 1989 book "Preschool in Three Cultures" to present perspectives on…

This paper briefly reviews theories of embodiment and then provides an example from our recent work on how we use video in our comparative studies of preschools to highlight embodied and implicit cultural pedagogies. The example we present focuses on how Japanese preschool teachers use the Japanese cultural practice of "mimamoru"…

Published twenty years ago, the original "Preschool in Three Cultures" was a landmark in the study of education: a profoundly enlightening exploration of the different ways preschoolers are taught in China, Japan, and the United States. Here, lead author Joseph Tobin--along with new collaborators Yeh Hsueh and Mayumi Karasawa--revisits…

Background/Context: Many scholars in the fields of teacher education, multicultural education, and bilingual education have argued that children of recent immigrants are best served in classrooms that have teachers who understand the cultural background and the home language of their students. Culturally knowledgeable and responsive teachers are…