Use of video-clip examples to interview Japanese special education teachers about their teaching strategies

Abstract

Current educational globalisation has revealed differences in teacher practices across cultures. Qualitative ways of doing research have helped to unpack cultural reasons for everyday practices. This paper explores the use of video-clip examples (VCs) to interview Japanese special education teachers working with children with autism spectrum disorders about their classroom practices. A previous study showed that a group of Japanese teachers talked about their practices in an abstract way so that what they were actually doing with these children was unclear to an Australian researcher. In this study, VCs selected from observation data of Japanese teachers' own teaching provided a concrete focus when individual teachers talked about classroom interactions and helped them articulate their culturally embedded practice. This method provided a useful way to interview these teachers about their classroom interactions from moment to moment and about their lesson study practices focusing on learning process. Talking about live interactions in VCs clarified their explanations of what they were doing. Their talk about the VCs was also consistent with the lesson study process of transforming knowledge from tacit to explicit form in their own teaching.