My name is Mikiko Tabu, EECERA CoCO for Japan. I am contributing an editorial for EECERJ from Japan, far away from Europe. Although only a very small number of Japanese contributions have reached this journal, the interest of Japanese ECEC researchers in EECERA is high and the number of participants and presentations at the annual conference is increasing year by year. I am truly honoured to have been invited as a guest editor, and I hope my participation will help to increase the dissemination of information from Japan.
Eleven papers are published in this issue. Three of these are from Norway, two from Finland and one each from Spain, Serbia and Germany. Contributors also come from a wide range of regions outside Europe, including Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia. This is an eloquent testimony to the fact that the journal has developed into a global ECEC journal that is trusted and expected by researchers from all over the world. For this reason, I assumed that there would be different editorial challenges than for a research journal published in a single country or in the same language area.
Sønsthagen, the author of the first article, presents a conceptual model of an ECEC facility that functions as a place of inclusion for families with refugee backgrounds, charting a path to redressing social injustice in Norway. The model depicts a workplace as a learning community, where staff develop multicultural professional competence. Referring Biesta, Sønsthagen says that critically reflecting upon one’s attitudes towards political topics can lead to strong discomfort, still, people must also endure what is different and foreign, and continues that ‘Educational staff … have a responsibility not to show resistance to learning themselves, where one avoids what can be experienced as unpleasant’. Japan has experienced rapid diversification in recent years. However, we Japanese tend to implicitly expect immigrants to adapt to our highly contextualised behavioural norms and view incompatible people negatively. This article provides valuable insights into attitudes of educators to inclusion issues in a society with an increasing number of immigrants.
The authors of the second paper are also Norwegian ECEC researchers. They collected observational records of a group of five-year-old children in a kindergarten to explore how children's spontaneous outdoor play contributes to their holistic learning. Their findings imply the importance of protecting young children’s opportunities for exercising their agency as self-guided holistic leaners. By focusing outdoor play rather than overall play, this study sheds light on the way children encountered non-human species. Today, global climate warming is forcing changes in the relationship between humans and non-humans and I expect the transformation is to start with adults and children learning how to interact better with nature through these daily encounters. I was also intrigued to learn that the respect for outdoor play in Norwegian kindergartens originated with Froebel, and that play pedagogy has spread all over the world. Japan also has a long tradition of Froebelian education, beginning with the establishment of the first kindergartens, which were founded as part of the modern nation-building process some 150 years ago. Today, Japanese ECEC guidelines clearly state the principle of ‘education through the environment’ and ‘learning through play’. However, the reality is diverse and many settings are keen on primary school preparatory education.
The third paper is a study using cohort survey data of children born between 1 January 2008 and 31 April 2010 and their mothers in a hospital district in south-west Finland. Neitola, Ursin and Pihlaja studied how parental networks influence the formation of young children's social networks and found that there was a significant association between children’s social relationships at 13 months and at 4 years of age. It also revealed the significance of parental social networks for children’s peer networks. The authors concluded that the importance of parental social networks and their influence on children’s social lives should be realised better in ECE and family/child services in order to more effectively support parents’ and children’s overall well-being. While the data used in this study were probably last collected in 2014, the references and discussion include the results of more recent research works. It suggests that the authors’ research question is still an important issue today. In Japan, two large longitudinal studies of children born in 2001 and 2010 and their parents are ongoing and contain items that can be contrasted with the authors’ present study. As these survey data are available for research with permission, the Finnish cohort study may have potential to be developed into an international comparative study between Finland and Japan.
Today, data from various large-scale surveys conducted by national and international organisations can be used secondarily for research, and an increasing number of studies are analysing the data from a unique angle. The fourth paper by Chan and Rao is a good example of such a study. Leveraging publicly available data from the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (ILET) conducted by OECD in 2018, they explored the influences of (a) socioeconomic status, (b) home learning environment and (c) age of enrolment in ECEC, on early literacy and early numeracy development of 5-year-olds in England, Estonia and the United States. The path coefficients for the hypothesised model in this paper successfully visualised the relationship between (a), (b), (c) and early literacy and numeracy. As Chan et al. carefully explain, the state of ECEC in these three countries differs widely. The difference in the size of their five-year-old populations is also immense. Therefore, I read the last sentence of the summary is highly suggestive: ‘Findings are interpreted against country-specific ECEC policies.’ Japan participated in the preparatory discussions but did not take part in the ILET due to significant concerns about outcome surveys at such young age of five.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced the ECEC field to make a rapid transition to non-contact programmes, the common denominator of which was an increase in activities via the web. Novković et al. investigated the effects of increased use of web-based materials in music education in Serbia, including the benefits in terms of parent-teacher communication and costs. The results showed an overall positive effect, but suggested that teachers need a high level of digital competence and that efforts need to be made to create and integrate digital resources to enrich web-oriented methods. Music is perhaps universally a popular activity in ECEC and in Japan, activities such as singing songs together to organ and piano were integrated into the curriculum from the time the first kindergartens were established. Educators have been required to be able to play instruments (especially the piano), and the acquisition of performance skills has occupied a firm place in teacher training programmes. However, in today's world of smartphones and other devices, music is material that is abundantly accessible without the need to participate in ECEC programmes. So why do we still provide community spaces and music education for children? The paper made me think about the significance of music education itself and the importance of questioning the choice of methods and materials for music education in the future.
The authors of the sixth paper, Martín-García and Rico-González conducted a systematic review of articles written in English and Spanish using two large electronic databases to evaluate the effects of free play on preschool-aged children’s physical activity level, and motor, cognitive, and socioemotional competences. In Japan, few such studies have been conducted to date, possibly due to language barriers in accessing international databases. While this methodology may be of interest to researchers in a similar situation to Japan, it was the research question that caught my attention. It illustrated the cultural diversity of perceptions of play and evaluation. Generally speaking, preschool educators in Japan do not pay much attention to the attainment of individual children. Early childhood education is based on the idea that spontaneous play is the most appropriate way to learn, and educators reflect on what they have done in class to plan for the next day. For this reason, few studies could be found that measured the effects of free play itself in preschool settings. Educators are watching over child-initiated and child-led play, participating when invited by children, and arranging the surrounding environment so that the play is more enjoyable and develops into something that fosters the children's qualities and abilities as indicated in the ECEC guidelines.
Lekhal et al. reviewed and discussed the effectiveness of a large-scale language development intervention programme in Norway, entitled Thrive by Three, which aimed to improve process quality (staff-child interaction) in settings for under-threes. This was an in-service professional development model, which resulted in an increase in the vocabulary of girls, but had limited overall impact. Intervention initiatives have been undertaken in Japan on a variety of topics. However, where intervention programmes have been developed, they have often been limited to presenting models based on trial results, and few have been rolled out on a large scale. In-service professional development for interventions is also not common. A thriving way to improve educators’ understanding, attitudes and skills is through workshops where ECEC sites present their research-oriented initiatives and show participants their practices so that they can learn from each other. For practices with children under the age of three, alternative visualisations such as videos and photographs are used, because exposure to unspecified visitors may destabilise children.
Neves, et al. conducted a three-year ethnographic study in a Brazilian early childhood centre to investigate young children’s cultural development, including dimensions such as play, literacy, and autonomy development. The concept of autonomy is understood on the basis of a cultural-historical approach and the authors say self-regulation is not only an individual and cognitive process but also a historical and affective one which is embedded in social situations in which development may occur. The paper draws from the records to shed light on the process by which a boy, born seven months prematurely, challenged and conquered a slide. Incorporating interview transcripts as well as photographs to visualise the process, it illustrates how the acquisition of an ordinary movement routinely witnessed in children's playgrounds – sliding down a slide – is achieved through the interaction of many factors. Theoretical studies on Vygotsky, Piaget and Wallon have flourished since around 1960 in Japan. However, it is rare to find an ethnography in a Japanese ECEC research journal that uses the theories of these pioneers as carefully as this article does.
Heilala et al. conducted a questionnaire survey of Finnish ECEC staff to find differences in the profiles of those with and without turnover intentions. An interesting aspect of this study is that the research focused on in-service staff with an intention to leave, i.e. those in the midst of a problematic situation that might lead them to consider leaving, rather than those who have already left. The professional qualifications of staff, the relationships between different qualification holders, or the presence and influence of special education teachers, strongly suggest that the workplace structure differs from country to country. On the other hand, the high turnover rate, the low pay and low social status of ECEC workers, which is not commensurate with their workload and responsibilities, seemed to be true in all countries. The current Japanese ECEC field, where promotion is based on years of experience and ability rather than academic qualifications, is seen as a workplace that exploits the motivation and commitment of educators, leading to a vicious circle where a decline in new entrants leads to a shortage of staff and further worsening working conditions.
Hubert, Nusser and Kuger used data from the German DJI Childcare Study (KiBS) to investigate whether parental attitudes towards childcare use explain why one- and two-year-old children from disadvantaged families attend childcare less frequently. They analysed the association between family structural characteristics (SFC), such as parents’ education, family income, migration background and family language, and childcare use. Their conclusion was that SFC and attitudes are related and that the use of childcare is influenced by attitudes. I learnt that what appears as an SFC is likely to depend on the demographic composition of the country or region under study. In Japan, where immigrants make up less than 3% of the total population, there is little awareness of the need to include migration background and family language in the SFC, and there are only a few ECEC studies that include them. Deciding whether to use childcare, until around 1980, the attitudes of grandparents living together and relatives tied to the family network seemed to be more influential than those of parents. And the grandparents’ generation had a negative image of childcare as inferior facilities for saving the poor. However, for the generation born around 1980 and after, childcare centres have become an indispensable social infrastructure for raising children: as of 2023, the proportion of one- and two-year-olds in full time childcare is close to 60%.
The last paper is also a study based on a cultural-historical perspective, but conducted in a very different context to the eighth paper by Neves et al. It was an intervention focused on a single teacher in a Chinese kindergarten and a group of four- to five-year-old children supervised by that teacher; Wang et al. studied how this teacher's teaching practice of engineering changed under the conditions of an intervention called Engineering Conceptual Play World (CPW). The effects of the intervention were not quantified, but qualitative data were interpreted. This study eloquently illustrates how CPW methodology allows educators to work effectively with groups and how powerful shared narratives can be in supporting children's shared and sustained inquiry activities. It may be interesting to note the difference between this and ‘pretend play’ in Japan, where ECEC educators do not directly intervene but watch over the children while creating the surrounding environment. Children share ideas that emerge from within themselves, incorporate topics they have experienced or seen or heard about before, construct scenes, create props using a variety of materials and develop their stories, all under the watchful eye of the educator.