Pedagogisk dokumentation – en pseudoverksamhet? Lärares arbete med dokumentation i relation till barns delaktighet

Author
Lindroth, F.
Year
2018

Purpose

The article studies how kindergarten teachers document children’s participation in pedagogical activities. The author is concerned with how the documentation is created and what the kindergarten teacher’s intentions are in this process. The purpose of pedagogical documentation in kindergartens is to analyse and evaluate the pedagogical activities in order to promote children’s participation in future activities. The study investigates whether such documentation promotes or hinders children’s participation. 

The three research questions are:

  1. What types of documentation are produced from the pedagogical activity and under what conditions does this occur?
  2. What intentions do kindergarten teachers say that they have when they conduct documentation, and how does this appear in practice?
  3. In what ways do the kindergarten teachers’ actions in the documentation process contribute to promoting or limiting children’s participation?

Result

The analysis shows that the children actively participate in the observed activities, but that this participation tends to decrease in the actual documentation of the same activities. The reason seems to be that the kindergarten teachers focus on documenting specific aspects of the project activities, while at the same time being concerned with the children’s participation. When the children show little interest in the activities that the kindergarten teacher wishes to document, they are encouraged to participate in various ways. In the documentation of the project, the children are presented as interested and curious, despite the fact that they were initially neither of these things. The author believes that this dynamic in the documentation work contributes to reducing children’s participation. The documentation creates an artificial picture of the children’s participation, at the same time as genuine curiosity, interest and participation on the part of the children are not documented. 

Design

The empirical source data consists of observation of pedagogical project work in two Swedish kindergartens, in addition to interviews with the kindergarten teachers who led the projects. The selection criteria were that the kindergartens were working on an adult-initiated pedagogical project, and that the kindergartens themselves described that they were inspired by Reggio Emilia’s participatory pedagogy when working with pedagogical documentation. The project work was filmed on three occasions in each kindergarten. Afterwards, the kindergarten teachers were given the opportunity to view the footage and comment on their own actions. 

References

Lindroth, F. (2018). ”Pedagogisk dokumentation – en pseudoverksamhet? Lärares arbete med dokumentation i relation till barns delaktighet”. Akademisk avhandling. Linnéuniversitetet.

Financed by

Ifous - Innovation, research and development in school and pre-school, Sweden