a Finnish case study

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Documenting with parents and toddlers: a Finnish case study a

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Kati Rintakorpi , Lasse Lipponen & Jyrki Reunamo a

Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Published online: 28 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Kati Rintakorpi, Lasse Lipponen & Jyrki Reunamo (2014): Documenting with parents and toddlers: a Finnish case study, Early Years: An International Research Journal, DOI: 10.1080/09575146.2014.903233 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2014.903233

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Early Years, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2014.903233

Documenting with parents and toddlers: a Finnish case study Kati Rintakorpi*, Lasse Lipponen and Jyrki Reunamo Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland


(Received 15 November 2013; accepted 5 March 2014) In recent years, there has been a growing interest in pedagogical documentation and the way in which it can be applied to advance pedagogical practices in early childhood education. This study is a case analysis which focuses on the transition phase from home to kindergarten of a toddler, Leo, and his family. Documentation was performed by the educators and parents with a tool called the Fan. Our analysis sought to demonstrate how the traces and inscriptions were created during the documentation process, and how they were applied and shared between Leo’s family and the educators. This was done by utilizing the idea of documentality, and in relation to the concepts of traces, registrations, inscriptions, and documents. Our analyses demonstrated that pedagogical documentation with the Fan not only served as a tool for the registration of facts but also offered institutional value. The Fan mediated information about Leo’s life between home and kindergarten, making his interests and feelings visible. Keywords: documentation; participation; toddlers; case study; Finland

Introduction In recent years, there has been a growing interest in how making notes, taking photos, and recording videos can be applied to the advancement of pedagogical practices in early childhood education (Carr and Lee 2012; Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2007). This area of work is referred to as pedagogical documentation. According to Dahlberg and others (2007), pedagogical documentation is a tool for understanding what is going on in pedagogical practice. The purpose of documentation is to make pedagogical practices visible and, in so doing, open for reflection. Dahlberg and others (2007) divide pedagogical documentation into two dimensions, content and process. Content involves recording everyday practices in early childhood education. It focuses on what children (and educators) are doing and saying. After recording, the information can be collectively discussed and reflected upon in social interactions with different parties. This is what Dahlberg and others (2007) refer to as the process dimension of pedagogical documentation. Pedagogical documentation and its use are never ‘neutral;’ rather, the function and understanding of it is always relative to the social situation in which it is applied. The recordings or contents of the documentation do not represent empirical truths or ‘reality.’ The meaning of any recording is negotiated and renegotiated within the situated discourse of a particular institutional practice.

*Corresponding author. Email: kati.rintakorpi@helsinki.fi © 2014 TACTYC


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K. Rintakorpi et al.

Researchers and educators have explored the possibilities of pedagogical documentation in relation to themes, such as learning stories (Carr and Lee 2012), or assessment (Alasuutari, Markström, and Vallberg-Roth 2014). There is some empirical evidence indicating the benefits of pedagogical documentation, both as an assessment tool and a tool for constructing learner identities in early childhood settings (Carr and Lee 2012). It is not only the educators who are doing or expected to do the documentation. One common procedure in studies using pedagogical documentation is to give children digital cameras (or video cameras) and encourage them to take photos of things and situations – to document their life activities (see Onnismaa, Rintakorpi, and Rusanen forthcoming). However, research on pedagogical documentation in early childhood education, especially among toddlers, has been quite rare. The interest of researchers has been mostly on portfolios and their digital extensions, participation, and formative assessment, with an emphasis on studying preschool or school children (Bath 2012; Kankaanranta and Kangassalo 2003; MacDonald 2007). To conceptualize what documents and documentation are, we need to turn to Ferraris’s (2011, 2013) idea of documentality, in which social reality (i.e. social objects) consists of inscribed acts. Inscriptions are necessary elements for the existence of social reality – and society does not exist without this kind of memory and registration. Inscription means that acts are based on a shared trace. Traces can be phenomena recorded on mediums like notebooks, photos, or videos, and they are not necessarily generated with purpose or intention. A trace that is registered and used for a particular purpose – and is shared by more than two people – is defined as an inscription. Any inscription with institutional value can be regarded as a document. According to Ferraris (2013; see also Alasuutari, Markström, and Vallberg-Roth 2014) there are two kinds of documents, weak or strong. Weak documents are registrations of facts without any practical consequences. Strong documents, however, have a transformative nature. They are acts with power and consequences; they ‘force’ people to do things (Ferraris 2013). In this paper, we extend the use of pedagogical documentation to understanding toddlers, and we involve parents in the documentation process. We will analyze the use of pedagogical documentation in a case of transition from home to kindergarten. We are not studying the transition itself, but the contents and process of documentation during the transition. First, we present our project, The Fan of the Child. We then outline our research questions and describe the procedure of our study, including the context, participants, data collection, and analyses. Finally, we present our findings and reflect on them in the conclusion. The Fan of the Child project This study is a case analysis drawn from an extensive qualitative study at a private kindergarten in Finland. We gathered data on site for the period from June to December 2012. In the overall study design of the project, The Fan of the Child, seven families with seven children from 13 to 41 months of age were invited to participate in the study. All of these families were newcomers; that is, their child was starting kindergarten in August 2012. In this article, we discuss the observations from one newcomer family and their child, Leo.

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The research questions The study reported in this article focused on how pedagogical documentation can be used to understand a toddler, Leo, in his transition phase from home to kindergarten. We wanted to understand the following issues: What kind of traces were created and registered, and how? What were the traces about? How were inscriptions applied for pedagogical work? Procedure Pedagogical documentation was conducted with a special tool, the Fan, designed by one of the authors (who also works as a kindergarten educator) and three kindergarten educators. The Fan is a safe, handy, and durable ‘folder,’ which was so named because of its outlook and design (Figure 1). The Fan folder was constructed gradually by parents at home and educators at the kindergarten, who first created small pages filled with photos and notes (readycut leaflets) about the child and his or her life. These pages were then added to the child’s personal Fan folder. To figure out – and later remember – who added what to the Fan, we decided that parents should use yellow pages and educators should use blue pages (Figure 2). Documentation at home Seven families were engaged in the project in June 2012 because their children were going to start kindergarten in August 2012. The idea was to start the documentation process during the summer as it could help in preparing the children for kindergarten. The parents were encouraged to take photos of things and situations that they

Figure 1. A Fan folder of a child.

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Figure 2. A home leaflet and a kindergarten leaflet.

considered important and meaningful to their child, or situations that could give some important information to the educators about the child’s life world in the transition phase from home to kindergarten. They were asked to look through their home photo albums, make notes about the photos they had taken, and insert the photos and notes into small ready-cut leaflets. The leaflets were then taken to the kindergarten, where they were bound together by the educators to form the Fans. Documentation in kindergarten The educators carried out the same procedure in school as the parents had at home. The situations, people, and items that they considered important for the child or the family were documented with a camera and placed in the leaflets with written notes. These leaflets were bound into the children’s Fan folders along with the leaflets that had been made at home. The educator worked as participant-as-observer; while they were involved in the discussions and activities with the children, they simultaneously recorded short video clips of the children’s activities; for instance, when children were playing with and exploring their Fans. This produced a total of 45 minutes of video data. Other sets of data In addition to the documentation with the Fan, we also collected other sets of data: email interviews with the parents about their experiences of how their child had settled into kindergarten; parents’ experiences of using the Fan as a tool for collaboration between home and kindergarten; videotaped interviews and discussions with educators; researchers’ field notes and photographs; and educators’ written notes about the possible benefits of the documentation for the child, the parents, or the educator. In this article, we will discuss the observations from one newcomer family and their child, Leo. Data for this case were drawn from a purposive sampling of the larger corpuses of data (Patton 1990). The data-set for Leo and his family was composed of home and kindergarten leaflets (including pictures and written notes). These included 15 minutes of videotaped material of Leo exploring his Fan (eight videos capture Leo using his Fan; five of them were recorded in August, one in September, and two in October). The shortest video is 24 seconds long and the

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longest about six minutes. The researchers’ observational notes, an email interview with Leo’s mother, and videotaped educator discussions about Leo were also analyzed. Leo and his family Leo was selected for a case study because he was just starting kindergarten and, because of his young age, he was not yet able to express himself verbally. Thus, documenting Leo’s life activities was expected to provide an opportunity to listen to Leo’s voice and understand his experiences and perspective in the transition from home to kindergarten. When he started kindergarten at the end of July 2012, Leo was 18 months old. He was living with his mother, father, and two elder brothers (ages 5 and 13). His mother and father are in their 40s and 50s. Leo’s five-year-old brother was in the same kindergarten as Leo, but in a different group of children. In terms of socioeconomic background, Leo’s family represented the Finnish middle class. Both parents gave permission for participation in the study. The Fairy and Troll kindergarten Leo’s kindergarten, the Fairy and Troll, is located in an urban area in Helsinki City. It is a privately run kindergarten with a long tradition of pedagogical documentation; for instance, in the form of constructing portfolios for each child. The number of staff in the Fairy and Troll kindergarten is nine, and there are 58 children (1–7 years old) divided into eight groups (7–14 children in each group), each group having one or two educators. In Leo’s group, there are eight children (1–2 years of age) and two educators. Four of the staff members (one of them is the author of this paper) were actively involved in the Fan of the Child project. The parents were encouraged to participate in kindergarten activities, such as pedagogical documentation. Analysis The analysis sought to demonstrate how the traces and inscriptions were created during the documentation process, and how they were shared between Leo’s family and the educators. This was done using the concept of documentality (Ferraris 2011, 2013), relating this to definitions of traces, registrations, inscriptions, and documents. Findings Altogether, 214 leaflets were made for 7 children from June to December 2012. Of these leaflets, 80 were made at home and 134 were made at the kindergarten (by three educators). The number of leaflets made at home varied between 2 and 23 per child. On average, the educators made 20 leaflets per child. Leo’s parents and educators took photos and made notes about Leo’s life world, describing what the pictures were about and why the things that were photographed were important to Leo. These traces were registered in leaflets, to be referred to and shared later. Leo’s family created six leaflets, while the educators in the kindergarten produced 20 leaflets for him. Leo’s leaflets, the register of traces of his life world, were made with a special purpose in mind: to understand and ease the transition from home to kindergarten.


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Because the leaflets were a register created with a special intention, according to the definition of Ferraris (2013), we can say that they represent inscriptions. Because of their nature as reified materialized objects, inscriptions are movable and can be recruited as vehicles for transferring knowledge. They can even be carried to new practices (Arnseth and Silseth 2013), though this may create some consequences. According to Ferraris (2013), any inscription with institutional value can be regarded as a document. In our case, the Fan takes the function of a document. Leo’s Fan is a good example of an inscription as a movable object (Arnseth and Silseth 2013) because it travelled between home and kindergarten. In an interview, Leo’s mother reported that she and Leo had taken the Fan home over weekends and explored it together. Whilst exploring the Fan, they had learned new words, recalled trips made together, and looked back on activities conducted in kindergarten. Leo’s mother also talked about the notes the educators had written on Leo’s home leaflet, which discussed the words Leo had learned. Thus, the inscription offered a shared reference and mediated the discussion between parents and educators. The inscriptions – the traces registered with intention, made by Leo’s parents and in kindergarten – represented the following issues: human relationships and friendships, such as attachment and caring; material things, such as artifacts, daily schedules, and the whole physical learning environment; and the possibility to do interesting and meaningful things, such as participating in and being respected as a valuable part of a community. Respectively, and following Allardt (1993), we can say that the inscriptions represented loving, having, and being (Table 1).

Table 1. The content of Leo’s leaflets. Loving

Having

Being

Home leaflets (n = 6)

‘Important and loved brothers’

Funny animals, owls, and squirrels

Swinging, songs, learning words

Kindergarten leaflets (n = 20)

Having breakfast with mother Hugging with brother Playing with father Making friends

Favorite things (animals) Daily routines (sleeping, eating) Music instruments and drama play accessories Leo has ‘quick brain and movements’

Playing and singing

Sharing physical, social, and psychological environments Building learning environments

Communication

Crying and getting comfort from an educator Institutional practices

Comforting

Building personal relationships

Learning words

Integrating home and kindergarten pedagogy and care Trips to the forest


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Inscriptions of loving Leo’s mother stressed Leo’s warm relationship with his two brothers. The educators also supported the relationship between Leo and his elder brother (who was in the same kindergarten but in a different group of children) by making inscriptions of brothers hugging and playing together. These pictures were used to ease Leo’s regret and longing for home. But photos as inscriptions representing Leo’s parents and brothers proved to be important in another way as well. In his first days in kindergarten, Leo started to cry when he explored the Fan and saw a photo of his mother. With the support of the educators, however, his sadness faded away little by little, and within a week Leo started to enjoy looking at the pictures of his family members. Pictures in the Fan offered not only a shared point of reference, but also served as a discursive resource and tool for collaborative understanding and communication between Leo and the educators. Using the Fan as a mediating tool was especially important because Leo was so young that he could not communicate effectively using spoken language. In many cases, Leo eagerly explored his Fan, showed a picture from it, and then turned his gaze to the educator, who read the notes concerning the picture aloud – after which they both repeated some simple words from the story. Little by little, Leo familiarized himself with the new community and established relationships with his peers and the educators. As he became a part of the new social environment, Leo started to build relations with other children and the educators in a joyful way. He was very interested in the other children’s Fans and showed his Fan eagerly to them. The inscriptions included pictures and recordings of Leo side by side with other children and his initiatives in social interaction. Thus, inscriptions made at home gave educators a tool that mediated their relationship with Leo. With the information from the Fan, they had knowledge, for instance, about those things that could comfort Leo. Inscriptions of having For the mother, sharing Leo’s favorite things (such as owls and squirrels) at home were the most meaningful inscriptions. The educators also considered inscriptions about artifacts important to receive and produce. They developed kindergarten practices with Leo by weaving his favorite things at home into the kindergarten activities and learning environment. For example, Leo’s mother made an inscription: ‘When we go for a walk we always try to find squirrels from the trees. Maybe someday we will give Leo’s pacifiers to baby squirrels.’ On the other side of the leaflet, there were the words of a traditional song about baby squirrels and their nest in a spruce tree. In the kindergarten, the educators took the children on a trip to the forest and searched the nests for baby squirrels. They also brought some puppet squirrels and owls to the kindergarten because they were Leo’s favorite animals. When they were getting Leo to sleep, the educators sang the same songs that Leo’s mother sang to him at home. These experiences were recorded in Leo’s Fan folder and shared with his parents. Inscriptions of being Leo’s mother was interested in sharing Leo’s language learning activities with the educators. Learning to speak was the next big step in Leo’s development, and he was practicing eagerly. His mother’s inscriptions of familiar and new words were


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useful in kindergarten practice, allowing the educators to more easily integrate Leo’s home language-learning processes with the kindergarten practices. The educators used the Fan with Leo by repeating the names of the items Leo pointed out and asking questions; for example, ‘Who is the person you are swinging with?’ The educators also explained to Leo what was occurring in the pictures. As previously noted, Leo loved to look at other children’s Fans, and, in two videos, another child looked at Leo’s Fan. On those occasions, the educators presented the Fan to the ‘visitor’ by describing what happened in the pictures and presenting the people in them. Most of the inscriptions the educators made concerning meaningful doing were about play and everyday kindergarten activities – or certain special events, such as a bus trip to the theater and a trip to the forest to pick blueberries with the puppet owl. The educators considered it important to make an inscription whenever Leo faced some new situation or activity in kindergarten, or when he succeeded, invented, or learned something important to him. In doing so, the educators wanted to communicate Leo’s daily life experiences in kindergarten. This also gave his parents an opportunity to reflect on these things with Leo and share his kindergarten experiences at home. The video recordings revealed that Leo loved to play with his Fan. Whenever he was browsing the Fan, he babbled joyfully. Every now and then he stopped and concentrated on some picture. He pointed to the picture with his fingers, repeated syllables and simple words, and made clapping movements with the Fan, glancing at the educator. He also used the Fan as a ‘skateboard,’ slipping on it across the rooms. The videos show that when Leo and the educators explored his Fan they mainly focused on the home leaflets and pictures of family members taken in kindergarten. Inscriptions as strong and weak documents According to Ferraris (2011, 2013), there are two types of documents, strong and weak. If a document is to be considered strong, it should have some institutional value and consequences. Do we have some evidence that Leo’s Fan was a strong document, or was it simply registering facts without any pedagogical consequences? With the Fan, Leo’s parents purposefully informed educators about those things that were important and meaningful to Leo. In particular, they emphasized and focused on Leo’s feelings and his learning of language, making them visible for the educators with the Fan. This information was taken seriously by the educators, and based on it the educators planned activities to support Leo’s transition from home to school. They sang the same songs that Leo loved to sing at home. Leo was given opportunities and encouraged to play with the toys he liked (such as puppet owls), and to go outdoors to seek squirrels in the forest with his peers. These are interests and activities that the educators would not have known about without the Fan. But this was not only a one-way process from home to kindergarten. The educators registered traces into the leaflet. These inscriptions travelled to Leo’s home where they were explored by Leo and his parents, helping them to revisit Leo’s experiences and feelings. The Fan was both a pedagogical and an emotional tool, which created connections across the boundaries between home and kindergarten (Carr and Lee 2012). In kindergarten, Leo’s experiences were also shared and discussed with his peers with the help of the Fan, to help in building a culture based on children’s perspectives (see Rusanen, Malinen, and Rintakorpi 2012).


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Leo’s Fan was used as a mediating tool between home and kindergarten from August to October 2012, and many activities at home and in kindergarten were developed based on the information the Fan carried. We can say that, in this sense, the Fan was a strong document, having both institutional value and practical consequences. However, over time, the meaning and function of Leo’s Fan clearly changed. Little by little his parents stopped working with the leaflets and the Fan, registering no new traces of Leo’s life. One reason given by Leo’s mother was that she could not find any new and meaningful things to register. The educator still produced leaflets, but more in the sense of registering facts (Leo’s first trip to the theater was a pleasant experience) without any clear intention of using the registration later, thus having no institutional value. The Fan no longer played a legitimate role in pedagogical activities or Leo’s enculturation into kindergarten. The Fan turned into a weak document. To get more pedagogical benefits from the documentation, and to help the Fan remain a strong document with pedagogical value, it is likely that the educators must find new ways of using it. In addition, more pictures of the home environment and family practices are needed to understand Leo and his family even better. Conclusion Ongoing discussions on early childhood stress the role of documentation in understanding the pedagogical practices of early education (Alasuutari, Markström and Vallberg-Roth 2014; Carr and Lee 2012). The process of documentation is applied to make pedagogical practices and the perspectives of different parties visible, and in so doing, to establish them as objects for reflection. In this paper, we have discussed a case analysis drawn from an extensive qualitative study on a single toddler, Leo, and his family. We have tried to determine how pedagogical documentation can be used to better understand Leo in his transition from home to kindergarten. The documentation was performed both by the kindergarten educators and Leo’s parents. Our analysis sought to demonstrate the way the traces and inscriptions were created during the documentation process, how they were shared between Leo’s family and the kindergarten educators, and the way they were utilized in pedagogical work. As a framework, we applied the idea of documentality (Ferraris 2011, 2013) and the concepts of traces, registrations, inscriptions, and documents. Inscriptions can become important tools for purposeful education: A concrete document helps a young child process experiences in different contexts. Our analyses demonstrated that Leo’s Fan, as a pedagogical tool, was not only useful for the registration of facts but also had institutional value. The Fan mediated information concerning Leo’s life world between home and kindergarten, making Leo’s interests and feelings visible. This gave educators new possibilities and opportunities to understand Leo’s perspective and ease his longing for home. At home, whilst exploring the Fan with Leo, parents could recall and share Leo’s kindergarten experiences with him. Involving parents in the documentation supported the idea of using pedagogical documentation to increase the reflective and democratic practices in education. Our study also revealed how easily pedagogical documentation turns into a pure registration of facts, without any intention of using the traces later. In our case, this took place in a kindergarten that has a tradition of making inscriptions and documents with educational value. Pedagogical documentation raises many questions, however. Registering traces – turning them into inscriptions and documents – is not a neutral process. It is a pro-


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cess of focusing, selecting, and interpreting the traces from a particular perspective, with some special intention and voice. Thus, the meaning of the traces, inscriptions, and documents is negotiated, renegotiated, and contested in the situated discourse within particular institutional practices. In the best scenario, the person who does the documentation builds a relationship with the one (be it an individual or community) whose thinking, saying, and acting he or she is documenting (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2007), in order to understand the needs and perspectives of those whose life worlds are being documented. Since the study is based on the idea that children have their own views and experiences and the right to be heard, the focus was on the child as a subject, not an object, in his or her own world. Children, teachers, and parents were informed about all aspects of the research. By making pedagogical work visible, it can be opened for democratic debate. In this way, pedagogical documentation provides early childhood institutions with the opportunity to gain new legitimacy within society (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2007). References Alasuutari, M., A.-M. Markström, and A.-C. Vallberg-Roth. 2014. Assessment and Documentation in Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge. Allardt, E. 1993. “Having, Loving, Being: An Alternative to the Swedish Model of Welfare Research.” In The Quality of Life, edited by M. Nussbaum and A. K. Sen, 88–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arnseth, H. C., and K. Silseth. 2013. “Tracing Learning and Identity across Sites: Tensions, Connections and Transformations in and between Everyday and Institutional Practices.” In Identity, Community, and Learning Lives in the Digital Age, edited by O. Erstad and J. Sefton-Green, 23–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bath, C. 2012. “‘I Can’t Read It; I Don’t Know’: Young Children’s Participation in the Pedagogical Documentation of English Early Childhood Education and Care Settings.” International Journal of Early Years Education 20 (2): 190–201. Carr, M., and W. Lee. 2012. Learning Stories: Constructing Learner Identities in Early Education. London: Sage. Dahlberg, G., P. Moss, and A. Pence. 2007. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care: Languages of Evaluation. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Ferraris, M. 2011. “Social Ontology and Documentality.” In Approaches to Legal Ontologies, edited by G. Sartor, P. Casanovas, M. Biasiotti, and M. Fernández-Barrera. Social Ontology and Documentality, 83–97. London: Springer Science Business Media. Ferraris, M. 2013. Documentality: Why It is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by R. Davies. New York: Fordham University Press. Kankaanranta, M., and M. Kangassalo. 2003. “Information and Communication Technologies in Finnish Early Childhood Environments.” Childhood Education 79 (5): 287–292. MacDonald, M. 2007. “Toward Formative Assessment: The Use of Pedagogical Documentation in Early Elementary Classrooms.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 22 (2): 232–242. Onnismaa, E.-L., K. Rintakorpi, and S. Rusanen. Forthcoming. “‘Take a Picture!’ Children as Photographers and Co-constructors of Culture in Early Childhood Education Environment.” In The 6th Journal of Intercultural Arts Education – Voices for Tomorrow, edited by H. Ruismäki and I. Ruokonen. Department of Teacher Education, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, University of Helsinki. Patton, M. 1990. Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods, 169–186. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Rusanen, S., P. Malinen, and K. Rintakorpi. 2012. “Art, Agency and Environment – The Perspectives of Youth Culture and the Culture of Children.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 45: 407–415.