The understanding of school children and their individualities is a fundamental theme in educational discourses, and often the approach for the practices of understanding children and their individualities is accompanied by many “guide lines” This is not a particular matter today, but some of the matters here take on a historical character. This paper attempts to reveal the nature of the problematic task of the understanding of school children and their individualities and how teachers did this in the past.
This paper therefore takes particular note of “Individuality Research,” which was brought into schools from the end of the Meiji era to the Showa era. This practice was argued especially at the beginning of the Showa era. Typically, psychologists who published textbooks about individuality research insisted that practices of “Individuality Research” by ordinary teachers involve failure, because they are based on methods which lack objectivity and are influenced by certain biases in the understanding of school children. In this way, these arguments produced many “orders” and strong norms for the understanding of children and their individualities in schools with problematic tasks. In this case, how did teachers carry out these tasks under such orders and norms' We take the “Individuality Research Book,” which was used by teachers as actual material for analysis, and we presume that the practice of individuality research was discursive/interpretive practice carried out by the members on a case-by-case basis.
In this perspective, individuality research─the understanding of children─does not refer to a specific approach to access their “nature,” as assumed by the public-academic argument at the beginning of the Showa era. In this case, we can see an
Ethno-method to “understand-interpret” children in individuality research books actually used by teachers. For example, in many cases teachers recorded children's individualities by an abbreviation meaning “same as above” in the cells. This work may be seen as just a routine task, but in some cases teachers also tried to record different expressions. This shows that teachers recording children's individualities in books engaged in an
interpretive practice (Holstein, & Gubrium, 2000) with previously recorded individuality as
underlying patterns (Garfinkel, 1967). Furthermore, this also shows us that the practice of individuality research by teachers as daily life members of a world is a kind of “characterizing” and “passing on of stories” about children. Because these works were not “scientific” and had no specific approach for accessing children's “nature,” they might be seen as a “failure” to create an accurate understanding. However, there were good reasons to see children as daily life members of a world. In conclusion, the reason why the understanding of school children and their individualities is appealed to frequently, and why the approach for practices of understanding them is accompanied by so many “guide lines” is that public discourse regarding the “understanding of school children and their individualities” makes the principle mistake of taking understanding as referring to the
interpretive practice of human (as a member of a daily life world) nature, and thus this discourse is able to assume a never-ending “failure” on the part of teachers' practices.
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