2019 Volume 86 Issue 2 Pages 249-261
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between pedagogical documentation and assessment/evaluation through an examination of the discussions of Carlina Rinaldi, Gunilla Dahlberg, and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi.
Pedagogical documentation is spreading as a tool of assessment, but some questions are still unanswered. Is it really possible to assess/evaluate using documentation as a tool? If so, what does assessment/evaluation mean?
Pedagogical documentation is an educational tool used in early childhood education in Reggio Emilia and Reggio-inspired contexts to enact the learning process in the classroom. Rinaldi, the previous president of Reggio Children, said of the relationship between documentation and assessment/evaluation, “I feel that recognizing documentation as a possible tool for assessment/evaluation gives us an extremely strong ‘antibody’ to a proliferation of assessment/evaluation tools which are more and more anonymous, decontextualized and only apparently objective and democratic.” I explore the possibility of pedagogical documentation as an “antibody.”
The findings are as follows.
(1) Rinaldi's discussion of documentation focuses on the aspect of valuing. According to her consideration of documentation as assessment/evaluation, the values are identified by the teachers in children's language and behavior and demonstrated to the children. In this context, valuing is not done intentionally; rather, it is inevitable and inherent in documentation. In addition, the indicators of valuing are not objective and external to the teacher, but within the teacher, and are visualized and shared through documentation. Rinaldi finds assessment/evaluation to be a political and ethical function in the process of documentation.
(2) Dahlberg, an emeritus professor at the University of Stockholm who led the ECE reform of Reggio Inspired in Sweden, discusses documentation with a focus on the aspect of meaning making. Dahlberg and her co-researchers take the perspective of “social constructionism” rather than “social constructivism”. According to their argument, pedagogical documentation plays a central role in the discourse of meaning making, because it enables us to take responsibility for creating our own meanings and our own decisions. Pedagogical documentation is also an arena in which the multiple voices of children, teachers, parents, administrators, politicians, and others can be heard.
(3) Lenz Taguchi, a professor at the University of Stockholm, discusses documentation with a focus on the aspect of translation. She takes the perspective of an intra-action pedagogy against “constructivism” and “social constructivism.” From her perspective, the documenter needs to pay attention not only to the relationships among humans, but also to those between non-human objects and humans. Her argument aims to represent an antibody to the decontextification and simplification in quality assessment/evaluation by increasing the complexity and diversity of the context described in documentation.
