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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.
Introduction
Documentation has become an important issue for policy, practice and accountability in many national contexts (e.g. Lindgren, 2006; Vallberg Roth, 2012). In the Swedish national syllabus for the preschool (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010), the documentation of children’s activities in preschool is a requirement. The materials used for documentation can include sources such as photographs, drawings and videos. One kind of documentation that is prominent in the Swedish preschool is the documentation panels of children’s activities publicly displayed on the walls of the preschool (see Harris Helm et al., 1997; Kline, 2008). Such panels make it possible for children, teachers and parents to communicate and discuss the children’s activities in preschool and to connect with and account for the achievement of goals stated in policy. These ‘publications’, which in this article illustrate how the documentation of a national assignment is performed, do not only make the activities in preschool visible, but also indicate the teachers’ interpretations of the curricular goals. The documentation of children is a social construction that focuses on certain things and excludes (possible) others (Dahlberg et al., 2008), and is a discursive practice that constructs children in different ways (Alasuutari and Karila, 2010; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Rose, 2007).
In this article, we are interested in how the documentation of children’s preschool activities contributes to images of who the child is and ought to be in preschool. A prominent characteristic of the construction of the preschool child is the child as a competent (Harcourt and Quennerstedt, 2014) and self-governing individual (e.g. Ellegard, 2004; Hultqvist, 1990; Lindgren, 2006; Smith, 2011). The child as a competent citizen (in the broadest sense of the word) is suggested as an emergent international discourse in relation to the notion of the child as a unique individual demanding a child-centred pedagogy (Smith, 2011). Against this background, this study focuses on a semiotic discursive practice in which representations and images (Bath, 2012) of the child are an important dimension of the documentation of preschool children.
The perspectives and abilities of children are connected to a practice of documentation and evaluation in Swedish policy. A focus on the children’s perspective is stated in the Swedish syllabus in connection with guidelines for documentation: ‘All forms of evaluation should take the perspective of the child as the starting point’ and their voices should be highlighted (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010: 14). This passage is preceded by a statement relating to the quality of the preschool in terms of the possibilities for a child to learn and develop (7). In the document pertaining to the process of documentation, it is stated that the documentation of children may enable the teacher to understand the child as a competent and exploratory individual (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2012: 38). As we show in this article, these themes in Swedish preschool policy relate to how the documentation is performed and how the image of the competent child is constructed. As Vallberg Roth (2012: 4) points out: ‘all assessments in documentation are formed from certain positions, interests and perspectives and take part in how the reality will be constructed and enacted’.
The purpose of this article is to explore how constructions of the competent and self-governing child are performed in documentation panels in Swedish preschools. The analysis of the documentation highlights two basic aspects: what kind of child is constructed and how the child is constructed. These two analytical dimensions are intertwined in the preschool context. The means of production – such as references to goals in the syllabus and the use of photographs to confirm various statements in the documentation – contribute to a specific depiction of the child in the preschool. Due to the design of the documentation, the documented child is always a child in a semiotic, including semantic, web of meaning. The documentation indirectly depicts the child and the different ways of being a child in relation to the different educational values in the preschool setting. Our approach is to analyse how this design leads to certain images of the child and the kinds of children the design produces. In the article, we provide an overview of research on documentation. This is followed by a presentation of the materials and analytical methods used. After presenting the municipal context in which the assignment for documenting is formulated, we follow up with a case study. The article concludes with a discussion.
Research background
Several studies have focused on approaches to pedagogic documentation in relation to children’s abilities and competencies. Some studies highlight documentation as a tool for developing the collaboration and conversation of student teachers (McNaughton and Krentz, 2007) and for understanding learning from the children’s perspective (Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Warash, 2005).
Kline (2008) describes how documentation panels can be used to capture critical moments in children’s learning. It is also suggested that documentation may provide an alternative to predefined tests, ‘providing evidence of children’s cognitive abilities’ (Kline, 2008: 73). Kroeger and Cardy (2006) find that teachers in early childhood settings can experience time constraints in documenting their work according to standards-driven assessments. According to the authors, the advantage of Reggio Emilia-inspired documentations is that the preschool teacher can instead exercise autonomy in documentation: ‘By documenting learning processes in an engaging and attracting way, teachers convey to the child that his or her work is valued’ (Kroeger and Cardy, 2006: 391). Thus, documentation seems to be suggested as an alternative to a subject-centred curriculum, with a focus on children and their growth rather than the testing of predefined skills.
Documentation panels are designed to display their observations and written reflections in public. They are highlighted by Warash (2005) and Kline (2008) as a pedagogic support for student teachers in that they can share their documentation with other students. Brown-Dupaul et al. (2001) point out that documentation panels enable teachers to share ‘activities and learning’ (209) with families by means of an attractive design (212). Moreover, Kline (2008: 73) suggests that documentation may provide ‘public evidence of children’s cognitive abilities’. Such experience of making children’s learning and development visible is also reported by Warash (2005).
Although some scholars point out that the documentation of children in school may enable the teacher to respond to the demands of accountability, others, including Harris Helm et al. (1997), regard documentation as an alternative to testing according to predefined agendas. Buldu (2010) connects the documentation of preschool children to formative assessment in the United Arab Emirates and suggests ‘pedagogic documentation’ as an alternative to standard assessment. Forman (2010) advocates a shift from standard evaluations based on numbers to a narrative approach based on videos.
Other studies have focused on the patterns of communication that have emerged between preschool teachers and preschool children during the documentation process. Emilsson and Pramling (2014) show how preschool teachers can take a passive, observing and engaged stance towards children. In the latter case, teachers tend to act strategically according to stated goals. When highlighting children’s participation in documentation, Elfström Pettersson (2015) concludes that the engagement in children’s participation depends on whether the preschool teacher takes the initiatives of the children into consideration, rather than the type of documentation.
More critical studies of documentation practices in preschools have accentuated documentation as a co-constituent of preschool teacher professionalism in relation to accountability. When documentation is done in relation to policy documents, certain dimensions tend to be highlighted, such as learning at the cost of care (Löfdahl and Folke Fichtelius, 2015). Fabrications that present an attractive image of the preschool for parents in the light of current marketisation have also been highlighted (Löfdahl, 2014). Löfgren (2015) discerns different approaches to how preschool teachers view the presentation of preschool activities to parents. For example, wall (i.e. panel) documentations are analysed as a way of convincing parents of the quality of the pedagogic activities.
Sparrman and Lindgren (2010) and Bjervås (2011) highlight that documentation in the preschool is, or could become, an exercise of power that excludes possible images of the child. Sparrman and Lindgren (2010) problematise the assumption that documentation will result in positive outcomes, such as enhanced learning and social relations. The authors analyse Swedish educational television programmes and their assumptions about dominating discourses of documentation being good for children. Furthermore, this documentation is mainly based on preschool teachers’ perspectives and does not take into account situations in which children ‘choose to deviate from assigned projects and do something completely different from what was expected’ (Sparrman and Lindgren, 2010: 254). Furthermore, when the documentation is displayed in public, the children are able to comment on one another’s work (Sparrman and Lindgren, 2010: 256). Bath (2012) questions why children’s participation is not represented in documentation. With reference to studies such as Garrick et al. (2010), she concludes that children are often excluded from participating in the production of documentation.
In her fieldwork, Bjervås (2011) notes a preference for descriptions of children as competent. She concludes that the rhetoric of ‘the competent child’, combined with an ideal of formative assessment, may exclude images of children’s vulnerability and the need for support. Ellegard’s (2004) study of Danish preschool teachers’ ways of describing the abilities of their children shows that a ‘competent’ child practically turns out to be the norm, and that children who do not manifest competence are perceived as being in need of pedagogical support.
In sum, research on documentation in the preschool has stressed the capacities and competences of the child, but also its impact on and limitations for teacher–child interactions. The critical perspectives focus on dimensions of accountability and power relations between adults and children.
Design
The documentation was collected in May 2011. Four preschools in two areas were visited – two mainly attended by non-immigrant children and two with a mixed composition, including many children with a migrant background. The preschools were located in the same city and municipality. The preschools were contacted via the heads of each area. Written consent was given from parents. The names and photographs of children without consent from their parents were covered with slips of paper before the data collection. All the names of the participants have been changed for ethical reasons. The study was performed according to the guidelines of the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
In one single visit, all the documentation displayed on the classroom walls was photographed. Some of the documentation was then selected for analysis based on the criterion that the pictures were connected to a pedagogical aim. The chosen material consists of pictures describing the children’s activities, accompanied by texts written by the teachers. Each piece of documentation consists of two or several pictures in sequential order. The texts accompanying the pictures consist of quotations from the children and descriptions of the children’s bodily actions. All the documentation panels include comments about the pedagogical significance of the pictures and quotations from the children. The preschool teachers’ intentions with the documentation have not been covered in this article. Rather, the result of the documentation as a discursive and public performance is highlighted.
Methodology
The theoretical framework for analysis is taken from critical visual methodology (Rose, 2007). According to Rose (2007: 12), visual representation is a cultural practice that ‘both depends on and produces social inclusions and exclusions’. In our material, the visual representations are accompanied by written text. Rose (2007) includes materials containing both images and written texts in her notion of discourse analysis, which is an analysis of the social production of specific views of the social world. This multimodal approach to discourse has been adopted in the analysis of the data and is characterised by a combination of words and pictures.
The documentations are compound texts, in which the syllabus, preschool teachers’ written comments and pictures together transform the meaning in each separate text/semiotic unit. In our material, the documentation consists not only of pictures, but also of written texts. These texts refer to the pictures, partly by their location in the same demarcated spaces and partly by explicit references to the pictures displayed on the documentation panels. The documentation is often in clusters with overarching themes such as ‘norms and values’ or ‘facilitating children’s curiosity’. The documentations are analysed as part of an intertextual chain comprising photographs and written sources (Fairclough, 1992; Rose, 2007), in which references to the national syllabus or local goals frame the documentation of the events captured in the photographs, but also in constructing the children as subjects (Fairclough, 1992: 133). In all the panel documentations, one or several children are portrayed in a certain way, and the written text further explains how the children portrayed on the panel should be seen. The photographs serve the purpose of documenting a competent child framed by the written text describing what occurs in the images – a systematic pattern of photographs visualising the child as a competent child. Thus, in the documentation, meaning is analysed as intertextual chains of meaning(s).
The selected pieces of documentation (n = 20), which were used by the preschool teachers to inform the viewer of the children participating in the pedagogical activities, were read through several times in order to discern recurring patterns corresponding to our research statement, with the image of the child in focus. A first analysis of all the documentations was conducted and recorded in an analytical document in order to obtain an overview of the preliminary patterns of intertextual meaning-making focusing on the construction of the preschool child. In each piece of documentation, written descriptions of the child’s bodily actions and quotes, both directly referring to the presented photographs of the children, were linked to quotes from the national syllabus. The three kinds of text – the syllabus quotes, descriptions referring to the photographs and the photographs – were read as utterances that referred to each other and included a coherent image of the child in each piece.
By adopting content analysis (Rose, 2007: 64–68), the pictures and the written text were reduced to a preliminary set of six themes, with the aim of achieving categories that had analytical significance (see Rose, 2007: 65). This first reading showed a clear outcome of representing the child as competent in different respects, with recurrent references to the ideals of the national syllabus. In the next step of the analysis, the six themes were categorised into three themes focusing on social relations, learning and verbal public performance. These categories, which were fully anchored in the data, aimed to capture the different aspects of the child in the context of preschool education: social competence: a ‘good pal’; cognitive development: an ‘autonomous investigator’; and verbal skills: a ‘public speaker’. Thus, by unifying the themes, a reduction of categories was performed based on the educational goals that are generally recognisable in early childhood education. The examples presented for each theme have been chosen in order to make the characteristic in each theme visible. By this categorisation, we do not claim to present a comprehensive map of how panel documentation is performed. Our result is, rather, a first explorative attempt to scrutinise a common practice in preschools.
The Swedish preschool context
According to the Swedish national syllabus for the preschool (Curriculum for the Preschool), documentation is included in the goals of the syllabus. The Curriculum for the Preschool states, inter alia, that: ‘The quality of the preschool shall be regularly and systematically documented, followed up, evaluated and developed’ (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010: 14). Furthermore, it states that both parents and children should take part in the evaluation (14). The main responsibility for implementing the national goals lies with the municipalities. The national syllabus also includes goals to strive towards. These goals are often vague and open to local interpretation. The observation and documentation of children’s everyday activities are thus strongly related to the goals formulated in the national syllabus.
In order to explain the examples, some of the basic goals are presented, along with details from the local documentations. The syllabus consists of two main sections: (1) fundamental values and tasks and (2) goals and guidelines. The latter section is further divided into subsections – namely, (2a) ‘Norms and values’, addressing the different goals and values to be fulfilled; (2b) ‘Development and learning’, with the overall aim to ‘promote play, creativity and enjoyment of learning, as well as focus on and strengthen the child’s interest in learning and capturing new experiences, knowledge and skills’ (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010: 9); and (2c) ‘Influence of the child’, addressing the need for democratic experiences. In the first theme, the subsection ‘Norms and values’ is connected to the documentation. In the second and third themes, the goals referred to in the documentation are taken from the subsection ‘Development and learning’.
The preschool child as a ‘good pal’, ‘autonomous investigator’ and ‘public speaker’
In the selected material, we discerned three basic ways of depicting the child: the child as a good pal, the child as an autonomous investigator, and the child as a public speaker. In all the documentation, these images are produced by references to local and national predefined goals. All three categories are described in more detail below.
The child as a good pal
What characterises the category ‘the child as a good pal’ is that the documentation accounts for how norms and values relating to social life are accomplished and concretised in the daily practices of the preschool. In Picture 1, entitled ‘The wall’, the documentation of the good pal is divided into three parts: ‘Development and learning’; ‘Norms and values’; and ‘Children’s influence’. These three themes correspond to the first three themes of the national syllabus (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010). On the right-hand side, provision is also made for a table for parents.
Two clarifications are formulated under ‘Norms and values’: ‘That children show respect for each other and are a good pal’. Picture 2 exemplifies how the documentation is related to these goals:
Example 1
The heading for this unit reads: ‘This is one example of Norms and Values. That children show respect for each other and are a good pal’. In the first picture, we see Tommy and Fanny are sitting at the dinner table. Tommy is pouring milk into Fanny’s glass. The picture is accompanied by the following text: ‘Tommy, could you help me to pour milk into my glass? Tommy immediately takes the milk and pours it into her glass’. The next picture shows Tommy continuing to pour milk into Fanny’s glass until it is full. The accompanying text to the second picture reads: ‘How do we know that we have achieved our goal? When we see that the children naturally support each other’.
This first example is intertextually linked to the other parts of the panel, as represented in Picture 1, including the explicit goals (‘That children show respect for each other and are a good pal’). The goals are placed in the foreground and frame the meaning of the pictures. Scenes from everyday life thus become part of a discourse of accountability, to account for preformulated goals. The answer to the question ‘How do we know that we have achieved our goal?’ (our emphasis) also makes a claim for documenting a truth, which is further supported by the pictures with accompanying quotes and bodily actions (Tommy pouring milk into Fanny’s glass). However, the documented interaction between Tommy and Fanny may not necessarily be a result of the former activities of the teachers based on the stated goals. The documentation portrays the children as performing these public norms either according to their own interests or as self-governed subjects (Ellegard, 2004). Furthermore, the documentation is ambiguous in its reference to the meaning of the children’s roles. It is not clear whether the ‘we’ in ‘How do we know that we have achieved our goal?’ refers to the children as co-producers of the documentation.1
The deictic reference in the introductory heading ‘This is an example of one of our goals’ (our italics) indicates that the documentation claims to capture the encounter between Tommy and Fanny in the documentation panel. Linking to the syllabus goals results in an image of the children as self-governed children manifesting capacity and interest to fulfil the goals by their own agency. The child who is constructed in this category is generous and respectful. Here, the not-always-so-respectful child, or the child not acting in accordance with the syllabus, is excluded from the pictures and the accompanying text descriptions. This depiction/construction is mainly achieved by intertextual references to preformulated goals and written comments of verbal and bodily actions.
The child as an autonomous investigator
In this category, the child is presented as someone who discovers principles in nature or in the technical environment on their own. This category can be linked to a discourse of child-centred pedagogics, which implies an open approach to the subject at hand and focuses on the children’s own initiatives.
The following example occurs in a collection of photographs arranged on a large sheet of pink paper with three introductory text bubbles, with arrows connecting the text bubbles to each other (see Picture 3). In the first text bubble, top left, a description of the children’s interests begins with: ‘Among the youngest children there was a great interest in water, which we took account of when planning the activities together’. According to this description, both the teachers and the young children were included in the planning of the activity. The continuation of the introduction bubble describes how this common planning resulted in an experiment using a water tub and toys in order to explore how water works. This text bubble is connected to another bubble containing quotations from the national syllabus on the right-hand side, placed somewhat below the first bubble.
The connection is illustrated with two arrows, each referring to the other. By depicting the text bubbles as related to each other, the model highlights that the values of the bubbles are equal, and that the observation of the children’s interests is legitimised by the syllabus goals. The goals quoted from the syllabus – taken from the main section on ‘Development and learning’ (see the above section on ‘The Swedish preschool context’) – focus on the children’s needs and interests in the planning – an environment that encourages children’s explorations of their surroundings and develops their ability to observe and reflect.2 These two bubbles are followed by the words: ‘Afterwards we looked at the pictures together with the children and they had an opportunity to reflect on what they had learned’. This initiative corresponds to a formulation mentioned on the panel: ‘Children should have the opportunity of developing their ability to observe and reflect’ (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010: 6).
In all the short dialogues, the concept of learning is addressed as a concluding question. By introducing the word ‘learning’ in connection with young children, their reflections and awareness of their own play with water are expected to develop.
Example 2
Two pictures show Milla standing beside a green bowl and holding a water jug. A dialogue bubble appears between the two photographs, which is introduced by a teacher (see Picture 4):
‘What are we doing in the picture?’
‘Pouring in bubbles.’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘Good.’
‘Did you learn anything when you were playing with the water?’
‘Yes, how to make bubbles and feel the flow of the water.’
The first question, which makes use of the pronoun ‘we’, addresses both Milla and the teachers. The act of reflection, as referred to in the syllabus, is thus initiated by the teacher, while the object for reflection becomes a common activity between the child and the teacher. The quoted sequences in Example 2 end with a question about individual learning, which is also announced in the last text bubble and narrows the meaning of ‘reflection’ referred to in the syllabus.
The next example with Niklas indicates that the relation between the goals, as interpreted by the teachers in terms of children reflecting on their learning about water, is not quite so obvious to the children:
Example 3
Niklas is holding onto the bowl and looking into the camera. The teacher asks:
‘What are we doing in the picture?’
‘Playing with water and pouring.’
‘What does it feel like?’
‘Fun and wet.’
‘Did you learn anything when you were playing with the water?’
‘No.’
Niklas answers the question about learning negatively. This example could be read as a documentation of goals that have not yet been implemented. However, the local goal, ‘they had the opportunity to reflect on what they had learned’ (our italics), is not formulated in terms of successful learning, but instead refers to the children’s reflections on their learning. The children’s answers do not have to be affirmative, but become examples of how their reflections and focus on learning are enacted. The documentation in Examples 2 and 3 can be interpreted as examples of ‘learnification’ (Biesta, 2009), in which learning functions as a basic concept for talking about education and how children are socialised into this language.3
In these two examples, the concepts of ‘exploring’ and ‘experiment’ are used in the first text bubble, which links the pictures and the dialogues to a tradition in science education. The dialogues are related to the national syllabus by the recurrent use of the word ‘learn’, which corresponds to the syllabus term ‘learning’ (which occurs 39 times; Löfdahl and Folke Fichtelius, 2015). Genres from science education and from education as learning contribute to the representation of the preschool children in their daily practices. The child as an autonomous investigator, by their own will fulfilling the syllabus, is thus a child who is interested in learning new things on their own.
The child as an autonomous investigator is mainly achieved by a somewhat large number of references to a number of goals in the national syllabus, as shown in Picture 3. Only one of these national goals is represented: that of reflection. Even though there seem to be tensions between the goals mentioned and the events captured in the preschool, the goals indirectly frame the child’s activity in line with the ideals in the syllabus, and thereby exclude a child who is not very interested in or curious about achieving the national goals stated in the policy documents. As in the former theme, depictions of the child in terms of accountability also imply social power in that the child governs him- or herself towards the goals in the syllabus.
The child as a public speaker
In this category, the child is presented as an individual speaker in front of a group. The following example comes from a project on ‘the butterfly’, which was presented on a board with an introductory text. The heading on the board reads: ‘The Butterfly’s Bag project’. Here, the purpose is to connect the activities in the preschool with those in the children’s homes in an attempt to make parents more involved in the preschool. The introductory text ends with an explicit ambition: ‘We are documenting everything that the children are saying and taking pictures of them showing their things’. The example below comes from a board consisting of 13 documentations, each representing one child performing in front of the group. In Picture 5, each piece of documentation is presenting the child as a temporary leader of the gathering. The introductory text is placed on the right-hand side in the first line. The second part of the introductory text consists of selected goals from the national curriculum, including the seven goals for communicative skills and cooperation with parents.4
Example 4
Three pictures of Nilla are shown. In the first, Nilla is holding a bag. The picture is accompanied by a dialogue and a description of associated events (see Picture 6):
‘What is in your bag, Nilla?’
‘A big, big car, bub [bus], big.’
‘Who gave you the bus?’
‘Grama and Mamie. It is mine.’ Nilla hugs the bus.
‘Nilla may sit then.’ She points to her seat.
‘Tiers, tiers [points to the tigers on the roof of the bus].’
We end Nilla’s presentation by singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. Nilla says ‘thank you’ and laughs.
The second picture is of three children. Nilla is in the middle with her hands on the roof of the bus, while the other children are looking towards the front of the bus. In the last picture, Nilla is holding the bus upside down.
In the concluding part – ‘We end Nilla’s presentation …’ – the gathering is assigned to Nilla and positions her as the speaker with the others as listeners. This is in line with the set of six goals from the syllabus, focusing on the individual child. This image (consisting of pictures and words) of the child as voluntarily adapting to public norms (Ellegard, 2004; Nordin Hultman, 2004) is also visible in the former categories. The text that accompanies the pictures makes no reference to the goals selected in the introductory text. Among the seven goals mentioned in the introductory text, it is not clear whether all the quoted national goals have been achieved in the documentation of the everyday activities, which results in a tension between the educational goals and the content of the documentation. The child as a speaker seems to be based on the pedagogical concept of show and tell, rather than an implementation of the syllabus goals.
One explanation for such a surplus of goals could be that the interpretation of the assignment from the municipality to try to account for as many goals as possible is implicitly connected to discernible pedagogical activities. As for the first and second categories, the documentation of individual children seems to exclude (see Rose, 2007) challenges, or non-fulfilled goals. An emphasis on what has worked may be linked to former studies showing how documentations are adopted to justify and convince parents and others of quality achievement (Löfdahl, 2014; Löfgren, 2015). In addition, when a child performs in public, the integrity of the child may also contribute to the image of a child independently achieving the accountable goals in the syllabus.
Discussion
In the documentation, the image of the preschool child is shaped by the techniques and resources that are to hand. The ideal child in the syllabus contributes to the production of the ideal child in the documentation panels. Furthermore, it is the children themselves who achieve the goals by their own agency. The documentation presented here follows the same pattern as that shown in previous research (e.g. Kline, 2008; Warash, 2005) – namely, to focus on everyday life in the preschool and make the children’s competences visible.
One factor that could contribute to the positive image of the child is teachers’ self-evaluation, where the teachers are able to confirm their own agenda and thereby exclude another child who is not always competent and engaged in fulfilling the goals. However, the image of the competent child is not only found in local contexts, and there may be ways of confirming pedagogical work other than by attributing competences to children. As Lindgren (2006: 126) points out, the tendency to label the child as autonomous and competent, supported by policy documents, is an international phenomenon (see also Ellegard, 2004; Smith, 2011). We argue that this discourse is also partly visible in the national policy but becomes even more developed when documentation is a practice of accountability.
The cases taken from the Swedish preschools show that the municipality intends to use the documentation of everyday life as a way of realising the goals set out in the national curriculum. This shows that the original idea of pedagogic documentation described in the above review (partly) changes by becoming an instrument for governing the preschool by incorporating designs originally intended for practitioners at the local level, as in the Reggio Emilia movement. This study thus highlights that the descriptions presented by scholars such as Warash (2005) and Kline (2008) do not fit with how pedagogic documentation is performed in such a context.
The selection and representation of the children’s everyday activities could be connected to a culture of accountability (Vallberg Roth, 2010), accounting for the daily activities in terms of goal fulfilment. In an ambition to embrace every child, the images of another child may be excluded. Bjervås asks:
May pedagogical documentation be perceived as advocating skills to such an extent that the opposite would not be possible to comment in relation to pedagogical documentation, since it would be tantamount to giving expression to perceive that the child does not fit in normality thinking? (Bjervås, 2011: 252)
A crucial aspect is the implication of social power, in which the image of the self-governed child becomes more or less mediated by the techniques for reliable knowledge present in the documentation. If the documentation is to promote education for democratic citizenship (Dahlberg et al., 2008), reflections on how our images of the child are produced are necessary. Highlighting the competence of the child always implies that it is the adult who has the power to define, not the child. If the documentation is used to empower the child, its implicit rules have to be taken into account. When such rules are part of educational governance – for example, from the municipality – preschool teachers’ professional and critical role in judging what should be counted as relevant for documentation should not be marginalised, but placed at the centre in order to represent the children in a justifiable way.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1.
The expression ‘being a good pal’ seems to be based on language that is typical for the child-pedagogue discourse. However, the other formulation about showing respect does not signal that the goal as a whole is related to an assessment or knowledge that includes the presence of the children.
2.
The quotes read: ‘The needs and interests which children themselves express in different ways should provide the foundation for shaping the environment and planning activities’ (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2010: 12); ‘The preschool should provide children with a secure environment at the same time as it challenges them and encourages play and activity. It should inspire children to explore the surrounding world’ (5); and ‘Children should have the opportunity of developing their ability to observe and reflect’ (6).
3.
A general pattern in this documentation is to construct the child as an individual learner – a depiction that is different from ethnographical studies of peer interaction in the preschool. Such focus on the individual child may be a consequence of the expectations of accounting for what has been achieved, which may be perceived as more complicated when the documentation addresses a group or individual children.
4.
The goals should ensure that children ‘develop their identity and feel secure in themselves’; ‘develop their curiosity and enjoyment as well as their ability to play and learn’; ‘develop self-autonomy and confidence in their own ability’; ‘develop their ability to listen and to narrate’; ‘develop a rich and nuanced spoken language and their ability to communicate with others and express their thoughts’; and ‘develop their stock of words and concepts’. The work team should show ‘respect for parents and be responsible for developing good relationships between staff of the preschool and the children’s families’.
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Author biographies
Johan Liljestrand is a senior lecturer at the University of Gävle, Sweden. He teaches in the field of preschool teacher education, mainly on courses in Research Methodology and Citizenship Education. His research is focused on education, citizenship and religion/life views in different contexts.
Annie Hammarberg is a senior lecturer at the University of Gävle, Sweden. She is a preschool teacher and a teacher in preschool education. Her research includes preschool teachers’ perceptions of children and the documentation practices of children’s learning in preschool.
