多文化教育における「公正な教育方法」再考 : 日米教育実践のエスノグラフィー  [in Japanese] Reconsidering Equity Pedagogy in Multicultural Education : Ethnography of Teaching in Japan and the United States  [in Japanese]

The rise of transnational society has made multicultural education an imperative not only for Western countries but also for today's Japan, which is experiencing an influx of people with different cultural backgrounds. This paper aims at grounding one of the core concepts of multicultural education-"equity pedagogy"-on everyday school life, using ethnography as a method. It analyzes the process of equity pedagogy and its relation to societal context in a comparative framework, and makes some suggestions for theorizing equity pedagogy from the point of view of school members embedded in the society. Participant observations and interviews were conducted at two comparable public elementary schools, in Japan and the United States, where teachers encouraged multicultural education for newcomer foreign children. A comparative analysis of teachers' attitudes and behaviors toward the newcomer children reveals that teachers redistributed three different kinds of resources to these children : "physical, " "cultural, " and "relational." The way they were redistributed, however, differed between the two sites in accordance with how teachers saw the needs of newcomer children, and also how they perceived their teaching. In the U.S., due to the pressures of standard testing and accountability, teachers took "efficient teaching" for granted, and this consequently led them to overlook any resource redistribution that seemed "inefficient" for raising test scores. In Japan, both the indifference of teachers toward the needs of newcomer children and an implicit consensus on "relationship-building teaching" encouraged the teachers to provide the newcomer children with only the resources that seemed to enhance friendship in the classroom. These ethnographic findings have several theoretical implications. First, they suggest the necessity of conceptualizing equity pedagogy as a practice drawn from teachers' "recipe knowledge, " and that the theory needs to be constructed focusing on the relationship between "recipe knowledge" and resource redistribution. Secondly, the findings imply that teaching practice in Japan needs to address relationship-building in a way that is centered on the consensus about the needs of newcomer children. Analyzing such experimental cases in the future will be beneficial for constructing a theory of equity pedagogy that reflects the social reality of Japanese education.