■6th Rikkyo International Seminar
on Education
“Learning, play and arts of Swedish early childhood education from postmodern perspective”
Play is usually regard as an opposite activity of learning. The perspective presupposes that learning is an effort to get the goal that is previously determined and play is absolute free from the goal. We make an objection against the modern notion of learning and play. Essentially learning and play is interdependent activity. The Reggio-Emilia inspired practice and research have developed the postmodern notion of learning and play. We invite the leading scholar and the theatre-maker from Sweden to discuss the learning and play. Dr. Monica Nilsson will talk her theoretical perspective and her current studies through introducing the actual issues of early childhood education of Sweden. Arts-based pedagogy is also a challenge for the modern perspective of education, learning, and life. The artist as an outsider of education will give us a fresh perspective to think learning and development of children. The dramatist, Bernt Höglund is one of the leading theatre maker for children in Scandinavian countries. He made two theatre plays for children in Japan. After two keynote speeches, Minoru Satomi who is the researcher of critical pedagogy will take comments for them. Finally, Hiroaki Ishiguro will facilitate the open forum session with Monica Nilson, Bernt Höglund, Minoru Satomi and audiences. The symposium will promote to reconsider the notions of learning, development and arts for children.
Organizer: Hiroaki Ishiguro (College of Arts, Rikkyo University)
Chair: Sachiko Uchida (Faculty of Human Development, Takasaki University of Health and Welfare)
Interpreter：Yuko Kawashima (Hokkaido University of Education at Asahikawa) & Chika Inoue (Department of Early Childhood Education and Care, Tokoha University Junior College)
Sponsored by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) for Hiroaki Ishiguro, 2017
Supported with Department of education, College of Arts, Rikkyo University.
- Date
13：00 - 17：10, Oct., 15, Sun, 2017 - Place
Place: Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Building Number 14, Rikkyo University, Ikebukuro Campus) Campusmap Access - Inquiry and Reservation (Ended)
Free of charge but preserve is highly recommended because of limited number of seat.
Reservation： Reservation Form
Inquiry： kakenmclit@rikkyo.ac.jp - Program
13：05 Opening Speech of the Organizer Hiroaki Ishiguro
13：10 Keynote Speech 1 Monica Nilsson (Jönköping University, Guest scholar of Rikkyo University) with Interpreter (Eng./Jap.), 60min. including questions for clarification
14：10 Keynote Speech 2 Bernt Höglund (Theater Maker), with Interpreter (Eng./Jap.), 60min. including questions for clarification.
15：10 Break
15：30 Comments on Speeches Minoru Satomi (Professor emeritus, Kokugakuin University)
16：00 Open forum
Facilitator：Hiroaki Ishiguro
Discussants: Monica Nilsson, Bernt Höglund, Minoru Satomi with Interpreters
17：00 Closing Speech of the Organizer Hiroaki Ishiguro
17：10 Fin. - Presenters
●Dr. Monica Nilsson, Associate Professor, School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University.
Swedish Early Childhood Education and the relationship between play/playworld and Reggio-inspired concept of exploration.
Preschools are increasingly focused on children’s cognitive development and school preparation at the expense of supporting the development of children as whole persons, their subjectivity. Two preschool pedagogies that do not fall prey to this trend, and which have roots in Vygotsky’s theories, are playworlds and the Reggio Emilia-inspired pedagogy of listening. In playworlds, children’s pretend play is based in an understanding of children as creative. The pedagogy of listening does not focus on play but understands children as engaged, reflective culture creators, and focuses on the creation of environments that afford children’s exploration, a concept not theorized to the same degree as pretend play. In this presentation, I first describe Swedish preschool provision. I then present my understanding of a preschool pedagogy that focuses simultaneously on play and exploration as sufficient for the growth of the whole person, that is, their becoming as a subject. I make this case by presenting two projects, drawn from an ethnography of three Swedish Preschools, in which children’s play and exploration were both foci. I argue that these examples force us to rethink what children do in pretend play and in exploration, and how both pretend play and exploration are related to learning and growth.
Dr. Monica Nilsson is a former preschool teacher and an associate professor of Preschool Didactics at Jönkoping University, Sweden. Her research interests include change and preschool development; play, exploration and teaching-learning in early childhood education; and more particularly playworlds, a form of adult-child joint play. She received her Ph.D. from Helsinki University, School of Education in 2003 for her study of “Transformation through Integration: An Activity Theoretical Analysis of School Development as Integration of Child Care Institutions and the Elementary School.”
Nilsson, M., Ferholt, B., Lecusay, R. (2017). ‘The Playing-Exploring Child’: Re-conceptualizing the Relationship between Play and Learning in Early Childhood Education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. Los Angeles, London: SAGE Publications.
Nilsson, M., & Ferholt, B. (2015). Vygotsky's theories of play, imagination and creativity in current practice: Gunilla Lindqvist's “creative pedagogy of play” in U. S. kindergartens and Swedish Reggio-Emilia inspired preschools. Perspectiva, 32(3), pp. 919 – 950.
Nilsson, M. Ferholt, B. Alnervik, K. (2015). Why Swedish early learning is so much better than Australia’s. I The Conversation: Academic rigour, journalistic flair.
And many others.
●Bernt Höglund, a Theatre Maker; Dramatist, director and actor.
“Children, Theatre and Art”: a lecture/talk based on non-academic artistic experiences.
A short presentation of how professional preschool theatre is organized and paid in Sweden, and very briefly about the difference between Japan and Sweden in this perspective. What do we mean by performing arts for preschool children, why is it needed and how are we able to define quality?
Bernt Höglund has been working with performing arts for people of all ages since the beginning of the 70-ties. He has created more than 40 productions at different theatre- and opera houses in Sweden and in the Nordic countries. Bernt is working with intimate performances and with a low voiced relation between stage and audience. His productions are all developed in close connection to the performing artists. They are very often based on a mix of performers from different areas like actors, opera singers, puppeteers, musicians and dancers. The working method is a combination of devising for acting and strict visual ideas. He likes very much to invite the artists to a “creative confusion” as a start of a new process.
“Nemuru Machi” was created together with Urinko Theatre in Nagoya 2010. The aim was to make a “Japanese performance with Swedish taste”. The performance is a result of seminars, joyful meetings and working-steps held once or twice every year in Japan since 2006. A new production named “Ojiichann no chiisana himitsu” was created in collaboration with Urinko Theatre in 2015 as a continuation of this work. “Nemuru Machi” got the prize of Jido-Fukushi-Bunka in 2012 fiscal year (http://www.swedenabroad.com/ja-JP/Embassies/Tokyo/4/2/-sys83/). Bernt is a member of ASSITEJ Sweden and has been a facilitator of children’s theatre workshops in about 20 countries in former East Europe, in Africa and in Asia.
Bernt Höglund YESSS! – On children, art and profitability. In Christina Nygren (Ed.), Theatre for development. Svesk Teaterunion-Swedish Centre of ITI, 117-121.
●Satomi, Minoru (Professor emeritus, Kokugakuin University)
Prof. Minoru Satomi is a leading educational researcher of critical pedagogy in Japan. He has been inquiring the notion and the function of school in the modern society, especially Japanese context. He has been introduced “new perspectives” against Japanese mainstream in education through translations and excellent expository comments of Paul Freire, August Boal, and Celestin Freinet. Recently he is interested in Reggio-Emilia approach.
●Ishiguro, Hiroaki (College of Arts, Rikkyo University)
Dr. Hiroaki Ishiguro is a professor in the Department of Education at Rikkyo University. His scholarly interests focus on theoretical investigations of learning and development from a sociohistorical perspective. Dr. Ishiguro engages in qualitative, micro-analytic video-based research. He has examined such phenomena as nursery caring activities, language development, play activity, classroom discourse, schooling, and disability studies. More recently, he has focused on arts-based learning and performances in multicultural and multilingual contexts.
Ishiguro, H. (2017) Collaborative Play with Dramatization: An afterschool programme of “Playshop” in a Japanese early childhood setting. In Bruce, T., Hakkarainen, P. & Bredikyte, M. (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Early Childhood Play. Taylor & Francis/Routledge, Pp. 274-288.
Ishiguro, H. (2016) How a young child learns how to take part in mealtimes in a Japanese day-care center: a longitudinal case study. European Journal of Psychology of Education, January 31(1), 13-27.
Ishiguro, H. (2016) What do children learn in their classroom? On research of learning practice, University of Tokyo Press. (In Japanese)
●Uchida, Sachiko (Lecturer, Faculty of Human Development, Takasaki University of Health and Welfare )
Uchida, Sachiko is devoted to pre-service teacher training of early childhood education. Her concern is children’s development in play activity and arts. She organizes PLAYSHOP with Dr. Ishiguro. Playshop is play-centered workshop as an afterschool program in a kindergarten. It has been carried out since 2003 in Miharu Kindergarten, Sapporo, Japan.
Uchida, S (2017) Tasks of New Kindergarten Education Guidelines in Comparison with National Curriculum in Sweden. Journal of Health and Welfare. (in press) (In Japanese)
●Kawashima, Yuko（Research Fellow, Hokkaido University of Education at Asahikawa）
Yuko Kawashima is a Research Fellow at Hokkaido University of Education. She received her Ph.D. in curriculum studies and teacher development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests are theatre/drama education, schooling and youth culture. She is involved in the “Communication education for teachers through theatre pedagogy” program funded by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Her PhD thesis (2017), which was titled “Performing ‘the Other’ and Becoming Different: Affects of youth and schooling in Japan”, is about becoming of Japanese youth at schooling. With experience as an actor, she conducts workshops in the educational field. She edited Theatre of becoming teachers: Learning through theatre method and design of communication (Film Art, 2017). Her articles include “Points of Connection between Drama/Theatre and Education in the Context of Class Practice” (Japanese Journal of Research in Drama and Theatre Education, 2015).
●Inoue, Chika (Lecturer, Department of Early Childhood Education and Care, Tokoha University Junior College)
Chika Inoue is a lecturer of teacher’s training school in the department of ECEC at Tokoha University Junior College. She studied at the University of Tampere as an exchange student. Her current research interest is how the teacher’s embodied responses to children encourage and participate them and develop their growth in daily practices in ECEC settings. In connection with this, she also researches teacher’s planning and implementing process.
Hujala, E., Eskelinen, M., Keskinen, S., Chen, C., Inoue, C., Matsumoto, M., & Kawase, M. (2016) Leadership Tasks in Early Childhood Education in Finland, Japan, and Singapore, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 30(3), 406-421.
Inoue, C. (2013) Reconsidering the interpretation of plan in early childhood care and education : by focusing on teacher's flexible response, Journal of Ochanomizu University Child study, 1, 2-11.(In Japanese) - Handouts
Monica Nilsson
Bernt Höglund
This page has been translated by translation specialists. The nuances may differ from the original Japanese.