The social construction of the competent, self-governed child in documentation: Panels in the Swedish preschool

Abstract

Documentation has become an important issue for policy, practice and accountability in many national contexts. The documentation of children's activities is a requirement in the national syllabus for the Swedish preschool. However, the documentation of children is always a social construction that focuses on certain things and excludes (possible) others. Such constructions can be linked to broader discourses of the competent and self-governed child, and the tendency to label the child as autonomous and competent in policy documents. The purpose of this article is to explore how constructions of the competent and self-governed child are performed in documentation panels in Swedish preschools. The theoretical framework is taken from visual methodology combined with an analysis of intertextuality. Three images (pictures and written text) of the preschool are discerned: the child as a good pal; the child as an autonomous investigator; and the child as a public speaker. In all three images, the children are depicted as competent in different respects. The result is discussed by relating the findings to broader discourses emphasising the competent and self-governed child.

Barn och vårdnadshavares minnen av deltagande i pedagogisk dokumentation

“…Forskare ställer också frågan om de som arbetar med pedagogisk dokumentation ger barn reella möjlighet att bli delaktiga i dokumentationsarbetet (Lenz Taguchi, 2012;Lindgren, 2012). Det finns också studier som pekar på dokumentationsmaterial som fabricerat, det vill säga att synliggörandet sker för att visa upp en god förskoleverksamhet för vårdnadshavare (Liljestrand & Hammarberg, 2017;Löfdahl, 2014).…”

“…Dokumentationerna uppfattades inte av vårdnadshavarna som fabrikationer av den goda förskolan (Liljestrand & Hammarberg, 2017). Samtalen handlade istället om att de mindes att de hade en god inblick i verksamheten.…”

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

“…Still, giving children a voice and stressing their own responsibility and capability might be seen as another way of controlling or governing them, since this allows only one specific way of being a child: as active, capable and responsible (Kjørholt, 2005;Söderlind & Engwall, 2005). This is also apparent in a study by Liljestrand and Hammarberg (2017), who found documentation panels, including photographs, displayed on the walls of a preschool to depict children as competent, thus excluding any other way of being a child.…”

“…Some focus on documentation as a means of making children's voices heard (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 1999;Lenz Taguchi, 2000). Yet others focus on how visual documentation depicts children as competent, which excludes other ways of being a child (Liljestrand & Hammarberg, 2017) (cf. also Franck & Nilsen, 2015).…”

“…What does the documentation focus on? Moreover, how do photographs play a part in preschool documentation, and what does this produce (see Liljestrand & Hammarberg, 2017)? Perhaps there is a chance of returning to these questions in the future?…”