The Documentation of Children's Learning in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

In recent years, systematic documentation techniques focusing on children's learning have been increasingly established in institutions of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). This article addresses the problem of a lack of empirically based knowledge regarding how these techniques are implemented in practice. It refers to theories of practice and performativity in its discussion of assessment and documentation as collective practices in which actors, instruments and practices conjointly produce selections. Based on ethnographic research, it shows how documentation practices in ECEC create the subject that is presupposed and intended to be the object of study: the ‘learning child’.

Pedagogical documentation and its relation to everyday activities in early years

“…Researchers, teachers, parents, and children themselves have photographed, videotaped, and transcribed various observations, feelings, experiences, questions and findings, discussions, agreements, forms of learning, needs, and skills to revisit the situations later (see e.g. Carr & Lee, 2012;Clark, 2010;Project Zero, 2001;Rintakorpi, Lipponen, & Reunamo, 2014;Schulz, 2015). If the documents are utilized to study and develop pedagogy, we can speak about PD (Alasuutari, Markström, & Vallberg-Roth, 2014, p. 31;Dahlberg et al, 2007, p. 145;Emilson & Pramling Samuelsson, 2014).…”

Situative Beobachtung und Wahrnehmung angehender frühpädagogischer Fachpersonen im Bereich Mathematik – Entwicklung und Validierung eines Testinstruments

“…Die Bezeichnung situative Beobachtung und Wahrnehmung (Gasteiger und Benz 2016) geht auch auf den frühpädagogischen Diskurs zur Beobachtung und Dokumentation frühkindlicher Bildungsprozesse (bspw. Heiskanen et al 2018;Schulz 2015) zurück und greift neben der wissensbasierten Wahrnehmung von Situationen auch die im frühpädagogischen Kontext zentrale gezielte Beobachtung von K Handlungen und Äußerungen von Kindern auf, durch die wiederum mathematisches Potenzial identifiziert werden kann.…”

Production and Products of Preschool Documentation: Entanglements of children, things, and templates

“…Att mallar och formulär har agens har även tidigare forskning visat (se t.ex. Alasuutari, 2015;Schulz, 2015). Det som denna studie bidrar med är inte bara att visa att mallar har agens utan också hur en mall kan bidra till att producera kvalitet och vilka aspekter som produceras som kvalitet.…”

“…However, as shown by Alasuutari (2015), whilst the IEPs strongly shape discussions, they can also be resisted by teachers and parents, producing them as one of the active parts in the relation between documents and humans. Similarly, worksheets, in the form of a kind of instrument used for documentation, can participate actively during observation and documentation of young children's learning, producing, and also presupposing, an institutionalised learning child (Schulz, 2015). Moreover, templates and forms have been found to be strongly agentic in research on documentation of students in residential care: for example, in a study by Severinsson (2016), headings and lack of headings directed the documentation towards things other than those connected to school subjects and matters.…”