Documentation Begins Before the Children Arrive
Documentation Begins Before the Children Arrive
Embedded Files
Making Learning Visible
Making Learning Visible
Recently, I watched Reggio Children’s free webinar Making Learning Visible (2021), which focused on pedagogical documentation and the Reggio Emilia approach.
The webinar included reflections from pedagogista Vea Vecchi and atelierista Claudia Giudici, and it really shifted the way I was thinking about documentation.
Like many educators, I have often thought of documentation as something that happens after children play. We observe, take some photos, write down what happened, and later create something to share.
But the webinar challenged that idea completely.
“Documentation is much more than a tale of what has happened.”
“Documentation is much more than a tale of what has happened.”
Questions educators might carry
Questions educators might carry
What are we listening for?
What theories might children reveal?
What relationships are developing?
What questions keep returning?
What are children trying to figure out?
That changes observation completely.
Instead of simply watching what children do, educators enter the experience with curiosity.
Collecting Traces of Thinking
Collecting Traces of Thinking
Traces might include
Traces might include
handwritten notes
photographs
video
audio
children’s drawings
transcripts of conversations
Memory alone is not enough.
Memory alone is not enough.
If we rely only on memory, it becomes very easy to replace children’s actual thinking with our interpretation of what we think happened.
There is such a difference between writing:
“The children were talking about light.”
and recording what actually happened.
The exact words.
The pauses.
The disagreements.
The unusual idea that initially makes no sense.
The moment when one child changes the direction of another child’s thinking.
The Same Documentation Can Tell Different Stories
The Same Documentation Can Tell Different Stories
The same material can create very different communications.
The photographs, videos, drawings, transcripts, and notes may stay exactly the same. But what we create from them depends on who we are sharing them with and what we are trying to understand. Documentation for families might look very different from documentation shared between educators. Documentation revisited with children might become something else entirely. Documentation can begin before an experience, live inside the experience, and continue long after the moment itself has passed.
The choices we make matter
The choices we make matter
Which photo do we choose?
Which words do we highlight?
What do we leave out?
What question do we place beside the image?
What are we inviting someone else to notice?
Documentation is never simply a neutral record of what happened.
We are always interpreting.
References
References
Reggio children. (2021). Making Learning Visible webinar series.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse