Understanding Pedagogic Documentation in Early Childhood Education

Revealing and Reflecting on High Quality Learning and Teaching

Joao Formosinho, Jan Peeters, Joao Formosinho, Jan Peeters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367140779
• eBook ISBN: 9780429638770
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Much more than simply recording events, pedagogical documentation is a revolutionary educational approach that enables practitioners to capture and understand the ways in which children learn and think. Exploring the use of pedagogic documentation across five different cultures, this book offers a unique insight into the conditions and methods through which pedagogical documentation might become an effective means of connecting teaching and learning.

By drawing on theory, research-based evidence and practice, Understanding Pedagogic Documentation in Early Childhood Education reveals pedagogic documentation as an instigator for critical reflection on practice, for the creation of new pedagogical approaches and improvements in quality. Observing and documenting the lived educational experience of children and practitioners is emphasised as a means of acknowledging their voice and rights, of revealing their knowledge, their competences, their attitudes and dispositions to learning. Offering contextualised approaches and considering the challenges involved in observing and documenting day-to-day practice in early childhood settings, chapters encourage professionals to reflect and recognise the value of documentation for children, staff members and the wider community.

Making a crucial contribution to the debates on pedagogical documentation, Understanding Pedagogic Documentation in Early Childhood Education offers researchers, students, policy-makers and professionals a comprehensive, and multicultural perspective on pedagogical documentation.

1

LEARNING STORIES

Pedagogic practices and provocations

Margaret Carr and Wendy Lee

Introduction

Philosophical curriculum practice in Aotearoa New Zealand

Developments in philosophical and practical pedagogy have shifted the landscape of early childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand in recent years. A major shift began in 1996 with the development of a bicultural national curriculum that emphasised an ecological and sociocultural philosophy about what to teach, what children learn and what an educational environment looks like.

The development of the 1996 early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand – Te Whāriki – and the history of its bicultural framing has been told elsewhere (Nuttall, 2003, 2013; Lee, Carr, Soutar & Mitchell, 2013). Unusually for a national curriculum document, a theoretical approach was signalled, and a diagram of Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framing was included. The text included the following elaboration on the relevance of this approach, highlighting the role of family expectations and the nation’s beliefs, in action, about the value of early childhood:

The third level, which also influences the quality of children’s experiences, encompasses the world of work, the neighbourhood, the mass media and informal social networks. It also includes the conditions that influence the well-being and support of the adults in the children’s lives: the demands, the stresses and the opportunities for development experienced by significant adults in each child’s life. There is a further national level – the nation’s beliefs about the value of early childhood care and education and about the rights and responsibilities of children.

(p. 19)

In 2017, Te Whāriki was reviewed and updated. In the 2017 version, an expanded philosophical section included a range of ‘Underpinning theories and approaches’ (pp. 60–62). Bronfenbrenner still appears, alongside others: sociocultural theories (Vygotsky and Bruner are named), Kaupapa Māori theory, Pasifika approaches, critical theories, and three paragraphs on ‘emerging research and theory’, which mention neuroscience and studies of gene-environment interactions that emphasise the role of high quality learning environments. The one document includes the entire curriculum in two national languages, English and te reo Māori, in a ‘flip’ document format.

A triadic perspective on learning: learning dispositions

Learning outcomes, described as ‘knowledge, skills and attitudes’ in the 1996 curriculum, are listed for each domain of the curriculum. Inspection of the indicative outcomes for exploration include ‘the ability to’, ‘the attitude that’, ‘an expectation that’, ‘the knowledge that’ ‘increasing confidence and a repertoire for’, ‘strategies for’, ‘confidence to’, ‘a perception of themselves as’, ‘familiarity with’, ‘respect for’, ‘a relationship with’ and ‘working theories about’. There were 112 outcomes, later listed on a poster. In the 2017 document, learning outcomes are described as ‘knowledge, skills, attitudes and dispositions’, and there is a section (p. 23) specifically on learning dispositions and working theories. In 2017, there are now 20 learning outcomes. The curriculum advises that over time and with guidance and encouragement, children become increasingly capable of (the following is a selection): ‘managing themselves’, ‘making connections’, ‘taking part in’, ‘understanding how’, ‘showing respect for’, ‘recognising and appreciating’, ‘using a range of strategies and skills to’ and ‘understanding’. In both the documents learning dispositions are defined as having three parts:

Learning dispositions necessarily incorporate a ‘ready, willing and able’ element. Being ‘ready’ means having the inclination, being ‘willing’ means having sensitivity to time and place, and being ‘able’ means having the necessary knowledge and skills.

(Te Whāriki, 2017, p. 23)

Work on thinking dispositions by David Perkins and others at Harvard’s Project Zero during the 1990s developed this three-part definition of the dispositional outcomes. They described these three aspects as: ability, inclination and sensitivity to occasion (Perkins, Jay & Tishman, 1993) and teachers and researchers in New Zealand have found this three-part definition to be helpful. Perkins has sometimes called them the three As: ability, attitude and alertness. Research at Project Zero (see for example Ritchhart, 2002) found that sensitivity to occasion, alertness to context, was particularly significant for learning.

Te Whāriki introduces ‘working theories’ as a domain of outcome as well; these are defined in the 2017 version as:

the evolving ideas and understandings that children develop as they use their existing knowledge to try to make sense of new experiences. Children are most likely to generate and refine working theories in learning environments where uncertainty is valued, inquiry is modelled and making meaning is the goal.

(ibid, p. 23)

These open-ended outcomes are presented as situated and sociocultural. They are broad, bold and brave. They are based on a 21st century lifelong learning rhetoric and they need bold and imaginative assessment formats (see Gordon Stobart, 2008, 2014 for this argument). They don’t fit well with tests and accountability targets that don’t reflect complexity, context and (dispositional) competency. These standardised tests report progress very confidently and efficiently. But do they do it wisely? This is our first provocation.

Provocation one: the search for wisdom

Jean Lave set out some aspects of a social or sociocultural theoretical approach to learning that we have found to be a useful starting point in this search for wisdom. We quote from a 1996 paper, where she argues for this reconsideration of learning:

Common theories of learning begin and end with individuals (although these days they often nod at ‘the social’ or ‘the environment’ in between). Such theories are deeply concerned with individual differences, with notions of better and worse, more or less learning and with comparison of these things across groups-of-individuals. Psychological theories of learning prescribe ideals and pathways to excellence and identify the kinds of individuals (by no means all) who should arrive …. A reconsideration of learning as a social, collective, rather than individual, psychological phenomenon offers the only way beyond the current state of affairs that I can envision at the present time.

(p. 149)

Mediated action, and narrative modes of assessment

Learning dispositions emphasise learning as mediated action, with a key element being the sensitivity to occasion. Writing about a broad, community-level disposition (collective remembering) and writing about textual mediation, James Wertsch (2002 pp. 10–11) commented:

My use of the term ‘sociocultural’ reflects an intellectual heritage grounded largely in the writings of Russian scholars such as Vygotsky (1978, 1987), Luria (1928, 1979), and Bakhtin (1981, 1986). A starting point for the sort of sociocultural analysis I have in mind is the notion that it takes ‘mediated action’ as a unit of analysis.

What of assessment? How do we develop ‘wise practice’ when the terrain is mediated action? We return to James Wertsch:

What all of this suggests is the need to make visible and to understand the role of textual mediation in collective memory. Among other things, this means analysing the specific forms that mediation takes in this case, especially narratives, and it calls on us to understand how such narrative texts are produced by the state, the media, and so forth, and how they are consumed, or used by individuals and groups.

(Wertsch, 2002 p. 6)

Influential narrative texts, in this paper, appear at different levels and in different genres. The first genre is represented by wide, national texts about what is valuably learned (of greatest interest to Wertsch’s interest in collective memory). These are circulated through the community of government, teachers and families. In action, they have kin theoretically with Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1980/1990). In the case of early childhood in New Zealand, learning dispositions and key competencies are included – and therefore reified by the government’s narrative texts – in curriculum documents.

A second, local genre of narrative text is represented by narrative assessments: Learning Stories. The development of Learning Stories in New Zealand has been well documented in Carr (2001) and Carr and Lee (2012) in the series of 20 booklets entitled Kei tua o te pae on the New Zealand Ministry of Education website and see Te Whatu Pōkeka (Ministry of Education, 2009) for a discussion of narrative assessment from a Māori world view and cultural practice perspective (kaupapa Māori).

Wise practice as finding balances

From 2008–2009, the two authors of this chapter regularly met together with nine early childhood practitioners over two years, to explore and research questions about ‘learning wisdom’, and this chapter owes much to their wisdom and to working papers that we wrote from time to time. We began these discussions with quotes from three scholars who have had much to say about teaching and learning: Robert Sternberg, Deborah Meier and Guy Claxton. Here are some of their comments that started our thinking.

Robert Sternberg: ‘When schools teach for wisdom, they teach students that it is important not just what you know, but how you use what you know – whether you use it for good ends or bad’ (Sternberg, 2003 p. 7). And in another Sternberg paper, the following comment was made:

High IQ with a scarcity of wisdom has brought us a world with the power to finish itself off many times over. Wisdom might bring us a world that would seek instead to better itself and the conditions of people in it. At some level, we as a society have a choice. What do we want to maximise through our schooling? Is it only knowledge? Is it only intelligence? Or is it knowledge, intelligence and wisdom too? If it is wisdom too, then we can put our students on a much different course.

(Sternberg, Reznitskaya & Jarvin, 2007 pp. 147–148)

Deborah Meier, Principal of a secondary school in Harlem (Power of Their Ideas, 1995), asked students to consider as a critical indicator when they evaluate their own projects: ‘Who cares?’ She added: ‘Knowing and learning take on importance only when we are convinced that it matters, it makes a difference.’ There were five questions she asked them to consider, based on the school’s ‘habits of mind’: ‘How do we know what we know?’ (a question of evidence), ‘Who’s speaking?’ (a question of viewpoint), ‘Wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Learning Stories Pedagogic practices and provocations
• 2. Developing pedagogic documentation Children and educators learning the narrative mode
• 3. Critical reflection, identity, interaction Italian and Belgian experiences in building democracy through pedagogical documentation
• 4. Pedagogical documentation as a shared experience of understanding childhood
• Index