Keynote speakers

Prof. Joseph Tobin
Prof. Mayumi Karasawa
Dr. Yeh Hsueh
Dr. Katherine Kitzmann，

Published twenty years ago, the original Preschool in Three Cultures was a landmark in the study of education: a profoundly enlightening exploration of the different ways preschoolers are taught in China, Japan, and the United States. Here, Professor Joseph Tobin, along with new collaborators Yeh Hsueh and Mayumi Karasawa, revisits his original research to discover how two decades of globalization and sweeping social transformation have affected the way these three cultures educate and care for their youngest pupils.

Prof. Joseph Tobin, Arizona State University, U.S.
Joseph Tobin is the Nadine Mathis Basha Professor of Early Childhood Education at Arizona State University. His research interests include cross-cultural studies of early childhood education, immigration, children and the media, and qualitative research methods. Among his publications are Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the U.S.; Good Guys Don't Wear Hats: Children's Talk about the Media; Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education, and Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon, and the new book Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited. Dr Tobin is also the director of Children Crossing Borders, a study of parent and staff perspectives on immigration and early childhood education in five-countries.

Dr. Yeh Hsueh,University of Memphis, U.S
Dr. Yeh Hsueh gradated from Harvard University and now is an associate professor of educational psychology and research at the University of Memphis. He focuses his research on cultural practice in preschool education. He was the co-PI on the multi-year study of preschool in three cultures: China, Japan and the United States (Tobin, Hsueh, & Karasawa, 2009), the sequel to the study of Preschool in Three Cultures that Tobin led in the 1980s. Dr. Hsueh was responsible for conducting and coordinating the China part of the project and managing the technical aspect of the video production. With his colleagues, he published a number of preliminary studies, including the video-cued dialogical method (Hsueh, et al., 2004; Tobin & Hsueh, 2007). He has extended the video-cued multivocal ethnographic method to investigate cultural and professional beliefs of preschool teachers with different professional training in Beijing (Hsueh & Tobin, 2003) and in Memphis of the United States (Hsueh & Barton, 2006). His publications include books, refereed journal articles and book chapters on research and teaching in early childhood education.

Katherine Kitzmann, University of Memphis, U.S.
Dr. Katherine Kitzmann received her graduate training at the University of Virginia and the Medical College of Pennsylvania. She is now working in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis, where she is the director of the Child and Family Research Area. Her research focuses on family processes such as parenting, interparental conflict, and parent emotion socialilzation practices as influences on children's social adjustment and physical health. Her current projects include a program to reduce interparental conflict during custody disputes, a study of the effects on children who are exposed to domestic violence, and research on parents' responses to children's feelings of anger, sadness and shame. In addition to being a researcher and educator, Dr. Kitzmann is a licensed Psychologist and Health Services Provider.

Mayumi Karasawa, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Mayumi Karasawa is a professor of comparative psychology at Tokyo Women’s Christian University. Her research interests includes cultural psychology (culture and self; cocial versus personal representations of cultural values; cultural variation in social thinking and emotional processes), subjective well-being, development for social cognition (cognitive processes in social judgment; moral development), and culture and education (implicit educational systems in school; child rearing). Prof. Mayumi Karasa was responsible for conducting and coordinating the Japanese part of the multi-year study of preschool in three cultures: China, Japan and the United States.