This paper tells the story of the struggle to introduce a Japanese sign language program in a school for the deaf in Japan that until recently had followed the government's approach that emphasizes oral communication. Our method and conceptual framework is ethnographic, as we emphasize the cultural beliefs that underlie the three competing…

This paper briefly reviews theories of embodiment and then provides an example from our recent work on how we use video in our comparative studies of preschools to highlight embodied and implicit cultural pedagogies. The example we present focuses on how Japanese preschool teachers use the Japanese cultural practice of "mimamoru"…