Practicing Pedagogical Documentation: Teachers Making More-Than-Human Relationships and Sense of Place Visible

• In Event: Found in Translation: Connecting Reconceptualist Thinking With Contemporary Early Childhood Practices

Abstract

This paper shares the practice of pedagogical documentation by two teachers bringing their first and second grade children ‘Out & About’ in their local place in Australia, seeking to understand learning within the relationship children develop with the more-than human. Pedagogical documentation has become a way to illustrate the relationships children are developing with the more-than-human as well as the children’s and teachers’ sense of place. Developing an understanding of pedagogical documentation and rethinking teaching practice is central to how pedagogical documentation has become part of the culture of this learning community. This paper will present an example of pedagogical documentation and related narratives created by the teachers and researcher, describing the tensions, ponderings, and epiphanies of the teachers and researcher engaging in this work.

Pedagogical documentation as practiced in the early childhood centers in Reggio Emilia, Italy makes children’s ideas and theories visible to the children, educators, and community contributing to curriculum development (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2007; Edwards, Forman, & Gandini, 1998; Rinaldi, 2006). Engaging in pedagogical documentation creates “a visible trace…that supports learning and teaching, making them reciprocal because they are visible and shareable” (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 100). As a means of making learning visible, explaining, and as an instrument of interpretation, reflection, recollection, and revisiting, pedagogical documentation creates a shared understanding, remembrance, and artifact of the community (Rinaldi, 2006).

This paper draws from the “Out and About” research project being conducted in one of the four settings in Victoria, Australia. The project includes the teachers, children, and researchers going “out and about” into places in a regional coastal town approximately 60 miles outside of Melbourne, Australia. Specifically, this group walks to Fishermans Beach, approximately a mile from the school, every fortnight, spending an entire morning encountering the common worlds of the place including the sand, various species, rocks, water, plants, and colonial histories. Framed by a ‘common world’ framework (Taylor & Guigni, 2012), “Out and About” is concerned with the ways children learn from the full range of human and more-than human relations within their immediate and ‘common’ or shared worlds (Common World Childhoods Research Collective, 2014). These ‘common world’ pedagogies (see www.commonworlds.net; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015) resituate learning towards inheriting and responding to the common world legacies in order to rethink common futures. Place is critical to this work and paying attention to the complexity and entanglement of place is part of the process. In thinking with place, we understand place is not “culturally or politically neutral” (Mignolo, 2003 in Tuck, McKenzie & McCoy, 2015, p. 1), rather place is a provocation as Fishermans Beach is a “territory that is Indigenous and which has been and continues to be subject to the forces of colonization” (Tuck, McKenzie & McCoy, 2015, p. 1). This understanding of place as a site of historical, ethical, and political context helps us to recognise the entanglements of place and practice intellectual, political, and ethical pedagogies.

Authors

• Adam Coustley, St. Therese's Catholic Primary School

• Christine Grayland, St. Therese's Catholic Primary School

• Jeanne Marie Iorio, Victoria University - Melbourne