Documentarians at Work: Early Childhood Communities Make Learning Visible and Valuable
- Pete Crowcroft
- Sep 19, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 2, 2023
In this podcast, Dr. Will Parnell explains the considerations that educators need to think through when documenting digitally, but also the power and opportunities that are afforded by this form of record.
Transcript
Documentarians at Work:
Early Childhood Communities Make Learning Visible and Valuable
For podcast
Documenting with digital technologies intertwines and grows equity and justice in early childhood education. Engaging digital documentation in early learning settings involves deep thinking with life-learning, equitable access, ethics, the possible, and justice. This educational way rethinks the meaning and purposes of educating in early learning.
There are many divergent points of view on what documenting digitally can mean in early childhood classroom settings. Significantly, documentation is a way of living, learning, and making meaning together. The processes of documenting living, learning, and meaning-making jointly through digital means opens new windows into how experiences are shaped and who can bear witness to them. This sort of documentation process can be pedagogical in nature when focused on learning and teaching in action and reflection; it can also become more than pedagogical and relate openly to life, experiences, and the meaning of life we co-construct day by day—herein otherwise called life-learning. To open educators, children, families, and communities to digital documentation of the lived events, learning, and meanings we make with young children offers more perspective-taking together; thus, creating more shared-voices and sense of democracy, equity, and justice through open access and sharing in life-learning.
In Parnell and Iorio, Giamminuti (2016) highlights “the significance of documentation in creating a culture of research (Rinaldi, 2006) that is welcoming and hospitable” (p. 9). This culture grows with children, families, communities, and educators as co-protagonists when making digital documentation together. Envision a film documentarian who is living IN and WITH documents: Imagining (pre-viewing) an idea of something ahead of time, recording events as they unfold, reviewing the recording for understanding, misunderstandings, surprises, mundane happenings, and so on, and (re)turning the documents with co-protagonists to make meaning of the events of life unfolding; AND, then choosing what is made visible. Thus, early childhood digital documentation remains only partial and offers varying views into life-learning.
Questions remain as to whom this documentation work is for exactly. This query brings many possibilities. For example, if digital documentation is primarily for immediate family, then what is captured of life-learning may be arranged differently than if for a broader community. If for extended family members, then determining how open-source it must be plays a role. If for the children themselves, then questions linger about how to share the digital documentation with them—on a tablet, laptop, lcd projection, in printed out form. If for a community of educators, then what is being shared changes based on the nature and intentions in that community. Such decisions should be weighty because they have implications for the documentation and the forms of digital technologies used. All considerations and choices intra-act and entangle with children’s life-learning.
Largely, Rinaldi (2006) reminds us of ethical matters under our charge as documentarians; that we had better know what we deeply believe about the nature of children—each child with us particularly—as we will confirm, demonstrate, and put forth narratives of the life-learning through our reflexive (re)making of the digital documents we are co-constructing. In this way, another question can emerge in how we stay open to alternative narratives from what we have known and understood of children as we co-create digital documentation. Staying with this question of how the child is a knower, doer, experiencer alters the nature and processes of documentation and influences choices of technologies and documentation pathways.
Further, context and place are vital in a process of documenting as well. Particularity of place speaks volumes toward experiences, learning, exchange, and engagement or any lack thereof. Place also offers important considerations for relationality, reciprocal exchanges and communications, and placement, hospitality, welcome, invitation, and interaction with the digital landscapes of documentation.
For example, working with a downtown gallery as a place hosting digital documentation: This gallery opens its doors to the public on the first Thursday of each month. For several months, children, educators, and artists-educators digitally video and document children’s playful inquiry with light, shadow, and reused-recycled plastics (figure 1). These videos and documents of children’s ideas are set up and shared as the gallery’s exhibit. The exhibit is also video-recorded for even more digital documentation of life-learning during visitations.
The gallery hosts a digital and technological documentation of a 10-minute looped video of children’s shadows (silhouettes) playing with reuse materials up against a light box (figure 2). This video of children’s original work is shared in the gallery along a backdrop set up near the entrance of the gallery. Open space with the precise materials the children used are placed on the floor and a sign invites gallery guests saying, “Go ahead…follow our silhouettes!”
As guests enter, materials beckon for engagement because they are lying next to a video showing children manipulating them against a bright light box. For visitors, it is easy to know what to do and also to discover a learning journey through the prior learning experiences of the children, materials, and lightbox silhouettes moving about in the digital landscape. Visitors know they are being video recorded just as the children had known because they see themselves in real-time on a nearby laptop screen that tells them.
In this example, the digital technology documentation shown in video, creates an alternative digital landscape space inside of the real gallery space—thus becoming a place that holds the real and digital landscape simultaneously for new and more life-learning to occur. This is a place where former and new ideas can flourish together from the original digital documentation to the now—of visitors being documented while learning about the children, materials, shadows, and light and as they play with these ideas, following the children’s silhouettes and their own imaginings.
This illustration is one of a million forms of documentation using digital technologies/engagements and an extensive form involving a community of gallery-goers, the early learning families, educators, artist-educators from the gallery and community, and the children. Children did have more opportunities to work in the gallery and also celebrate their life-learning documentation accomplishments (figure 3). Children’s additional visits were digitally documented and re-shared on a blog.
This example only happened due to key features, including a project funder, the kindergarten teachers’ artist-spouse, and gallery access where children became publicly visible through this exhibit. The educational project took 2 years and was an intense amount of work for a small group; it was also well-received in the broader community.
Rather than thinking this example should be reproduced across every context and reduced to a formulaic curricular exercise that is tic-boxed to completion, imagine each educational project offering of digital documentation as unique, unrepeatable sets of experiences; all holding and producing value for more opportunities across divergent ways of knowing, doing, and being. This openness to the endless variety of documentation and making life-learning visible, valued, and valuable is an idea that can drive narrative-sharing.
If digital documentation is a living record of young children’s life-learning and childhoods, then it can speak to educators, adults, and adulthood in new, novel, and innovative ways. Thus, authentically showing and changing the image of child and childhood. Further, this work of documentation offers potentiality and the possible, exponentially through digital technologies; thereby widening digital documentation doors to justice.
Figure 1: Children, Reuse Plastics, and Light
Figure 2: Gallery Silhouette Digital Video for Visitors
Figure 3: Children Revisiting the Downtown Gallery
Will Parnell, EdD, Curriculum and Instruction: Early Childhood, Portland State University, USA
Please note - this reading is in press and cannot be shared or used beyond this blog.
How do you envision your work a documentarian living IN and WITH children, teachers, and community learning?
Who practices documentarian work with you and who is this work for?
How do you go about finding deeper meaning when you make learning visible?
As documentarians in the senior years, we listen to our students and guide them in sharing their interpretations of the world while also engaging with the perspectives of others. As a team of 3 educators, we work alongside our students capturing their thinking through writing, conversations, questioning, reflecting and digital media. We have engaged in deep conversations around our Storyboard and the themes of Social Justice. By making learning visible through documentation, students are able to revisit and reflect on their ideas.
As teachers and educators it is our role to work as a team, with families and within our communities to support children and make their learning visible. Through documentation such as photography and drawings children’s views of the world can be expressed, and allows them to develop their creativity, meaning making and understandings of the world around them. With digital documentation it opens up possibilities for children to express their hundred languages. Through the use of digital technologies such as light boxes and exploring concepts such as light and shadow, children work with others to express ideas and engage in a process of collaborative learning and exploration. Making children’s learning visible involves seeing children as capable and competent, listening and…
These stories of documentation are inspiring and makes me think that it can be an invitation for community to participate and co-create with students and teachers. This documentation has clear purpose and puts children at the centre. It demonstrates that they are part of the community and have agency. Digital technologies open up so many opportunities for meaning making and re turning to learning.
The craft of documentation, when practiced authentically, mirrors the art of fostering deep learning and genuine meaning-making. At its core lies intentional and attuned observation — noticing the subtle details within children’s interactions: what they say and how they say it, their gestures, expressions, and relationships. Equally vital is creating the time and space where educators, children, and others come together to interpret, hypothesise, and ask questions. Through this shared inquiry, multiple voices are honoured, dialogue is opened, and new insights emerge to guide further teaching and learning. In this way, documentation becomes both a process of co-learning and a pathway toward lifelong learning.
Documenting in this way is a new concept in our learning space. We have used photos, videos, drawings, and writing to document students thinking and developing ideas. The readings lead me to think that documentation is a part of the learning process and not just an end point of learning.
Documentarian work is for all members of the learning community, but can also be shared with others to inform about the learning and thinking process.
Deeper learning could be generated through rereading, reviewing and reengaging with documented learning to discuss and engage through other perspectives.