This paper aims to examine the factors that hinder teachers’ organized support for "newcomer students" who came from non-Japanese cultures with a special focus on the difference among teachers in mode of their representation of newcomer students’ needs and kinds of support that they need. It was found that even for the same newcomer students, there were differences among teachers in mode of representation regarding the students’ needs and the supports that teachers considered. The differences in mode of representation for newcomer students may have been caused by the differences in the language that teachers use for the same newcomer students. In addition, specific terms that teachers use to describe newcomer students were found to be acquired through their school administrative duties that they were assigned to and the roles they play there, and it was found difficult to share information about newcomer students even within the teacher groups. It was inferred that the support for newcomer students taking social differences into account is less likely to become an issue discussed in teacher groups, making it difficult to provide systematic support for them. This paper points out that the establishment of an organizational structure to help teachers support newcomer students is important for actualizing effective support of newcomer students and incorporating students’ social differences.

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This study focused on the "gaps" between childcare workers' recognition of children’s needs and the reality of children as a framework of reflection and contemplation and proposes that studying this issue contributes to childcare workers' self-transformation and improvement of their practice. First, we summarized the importance of understanding and reflecting on young children’s needs and delineated its relationship to the childcare workers' recognition of gaps. Next, we incorporated other relevant practices that involve in-person assistance and discussed the methodology and results of previous studies of gaps, assigning each gap into four quadrants. Organizing and inspecting the nature of the gaps in each quadrant, we attempted to establish a research framework on childcare workers' recognition of such gaps. As a result, it became evident that some such gaps between adults and preschool children were unable to be sufficiently identified as to categorize them into any of the four quadrants. However, this issue has been rarely studied by researchers. To promote research in this area, we presented a research method to study the issues assigned to each quadrant, suggesting that future developments would include examining the childcare workers' recognition of these gaps by using mixed methods.

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