Intense Years - Fukuzawa, Rebecca Erwin

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Résumé :
INTENSE YEARS examines the lives of young adolescents in Japanese middle schools, focusing on the dynamics of school, family, and social life, and explores the change from child to adolescent that takes place in the middle school years. The authors discuss several themes that play a major role in how Japanese adolescents deal with school, academic pressure, social maturation, social hierarchy, personality development, and the development of gender identity. Students of varying economic, family, and social backgrounds tell their stories. In describing and analyzing the lives of middle school students, Gerald K. LeTendre and Rebecca Erwin Fukuzawa offer the reader a new perspective on Japanese education and society that demonstrates the successes and problems faced by Japanese students, parents, and teachers.This book shows how young adolescents cope with a rapid stage of development in a culture that is extremely different from that found in western nations. The intensity of their academic studies and social obligations makes early adolescence an intense period which highlights cultural contradictions in modern Japanese society such as the conflict between the ideal of group harmony and fierce individual competition.For American psychologists and educators -- who face an increasingly racially and ethnically mixed population in U.S. schools -- this book offers a major analysis of the impact of culture and institutions on the process of identity development during early adolescence.

Biographie:
Gerald Letendre is Assistant Professor, Educational Policy, Pennsylvania State. He has most recently published (with Thomas Rohlen) Teaching and Learning in Japan (Cambridge U P, 1996). He received his Ph.D. in education from Stanford University and his M.A. in sociology from Stanford as well. Rebecca Fukuzawa received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Northwestern University and is currently Lecturer at Tokyo University.

Sommaire:
The Context of Schooling 1. Life in the Classroom; 2. The Academic Curriculum; 3. The Social Curriculum: Counselling, Guidance, and Planning for the Future; Peer Relations and Maturation. 1. Peers and Friendships: Groups and Expanding Social Networks (Committees, Clubs, Events); 2. Girls and Boys: Development of Gender Differences; 3. Adjustment: Problems In School and Out; Relations With Adults 1. Teachers and Coaches; 2. Parents, Families and their Relation to School; 3. Exams, Juku, and the Pressure to Advance in School; Conclusion: A Question of Balance Appendix I: Field Sites and Data Collection; Appendix II: Japanese Terms