How Do Teachers Intervene in Conflicts Between Children?: A Case Study of a Daycare Center in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area

Abstract

Research on daycare centers in Japan has found that daycare teachers aim to encourage empathy in children and that teachers intervene in conflicts between children more frequently than in the past. This paper provides a multimodal conversation analysis of interaction between teachers and two/three-year-old children in a daycare center in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. It compares two cases of intervention and illustrates important differences in what the teachers are doing through their utterances and bodily resources when they intervene in a conflict between children during play time. Examining their utterances and bodily resources, it also attempts to describe how the teachers orient differently to the socialization of morality. The paper showed that one of the teachers completed her intervention successfully, thereby achieving the socialization of morality in situ, when she treated children as agents who are morally responsible for their own actions, and when she made use of her design of utterances, gaze, and body positioning.