Performing Self and Society: Growth and Maturity at a Japanese Junior High School

Abstract

370 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.This study brings us inside a contemporary public junior high school in Kobe, Japan, providing a window on students' everyday experiences and struggles with growing up and learning the principles and responsibilities of becoming a member of Japanese adult society. On the one hand demonstrating teachers' ethnopedagogical schema of curriculum and pedagogy that is strongly linked to cultural notions of developmental readiness, this study on the other hand explores how student participation in an increasingly complex series of lessons, activities, and practices shape their identities over time as junior high school students and as members of Japanese society. Social discourses and conditions in broader society emerge in teacher practice and surface in students' conversations and writings that offer glimpses of how they see themselves and their futures vis-a-vis these received views. As they navigate between the worlds of school and of broader society, school events such as school excursions and "Let's Try Week" challenge students to extend concepts of selfhood by providing opportunities for performing emerging concepts of self and society outside the school perimeter.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD