Documenting Children’s Meaning: Engaging in Design and Creativity with Children and Families
by Jason Avery, Karyn Callaghan, and Carol Anne Wien
I recently had the great privilege of visiting Reggio Emilia, Italy where every day I saw and heard how and why teachers, pedagogistas, and atelieristas using the Reggio Emilia Approach create documentation. Documentation in the Reggio Emilia Approach is not about proving children’s abilities to meet adult-identified benchmarks of academic success… though their documentation richly captures children’s depth of thinking, knowledge, learning and skill development. Instead, their documentation is about seeking children’s expressions of curiosity, theory-making, and growing knowledge and relationships with ideas, materials, others, and self.
I was also privileged to take this sojourn with other educators from Canada, Australia and the United States, along with Karyn Callaghan – one of the authors of Documenting Children’s Meaning: Engaging in Design and Creativity with Children and Families.
Karyn distinguishes different meanings between documenting and documentation. Taking photos or videos, recording children’s words are documenting activities that have the potential of leading to the creation of documentation. Documentation emerges through intention and reflection about what will and has been documented. Documentation reveals a more complex and evolving story about how a child or group of children are making meaning of their world.
Documentation is qualitatively different and more meaningful when educators become researchers who are deeply curious about children’s wonderings; when educators seek to discover the myriad of ways infants, toddlers and young children continually try to make sense of how the world works and their place within it.
Documenting Children’s Meaning is an invaluable resource for North American early learning educators who work in varied contexts (including drop-in family/child programs) The authors share inspiring and accessible examples of why we document and create documentation that is important to children, families, educators, and society.
Documenting Children’s Meaning is not about proving children’s mastery of skills. Rather it’s about how documentation creates and shapes relationships – relationships children develop with and through materials, music, science, the natural world, others and self. The words and images in this book are stories of children deep in thought, exploration, learning, and expression.
The authors’ passion for this work is evident on each page of this book. As Jason Avery explains:
“I want us to be able to look together to see children with agency, motivated not by coercion or the desire to please, but by their innate curiosity, their urge to clarify and to bring things into relation.” 1
As I read and re-read this book, I was struck that documentation is not solely about recognizing, affirming and deepening children’s meaning making. It’s also about new meanings and transformations that simultaneously occur within and among educators, parents and families through documenting, and through the creation of documentation.
“This book is not and cannot be a how-to-manual. Ideas of the view of the child, the inclusion of parent, and respect are lenses through which we try our theories, but relationships must be built. How they are built relies on those involved and the context in which it takes place. This can be a lovely balance of freedom and responsibility.” 2
The concepts shared in Documenting Children’s Meaning are richly illuminated with photos of children exploring and expressing their wonderings and ideas through play, the languages of art, and story. It offers educators inspiration and guidance to deepen children’s investigations in their own contexts, and to make children’s thinking visible through collaboration with children, their families, other educators and adults, and the wider community.
1 & 2 Avery, J., Callaghan K., Wien, C. (2016). Documenting Children’s Meaning: Engaging in Design and Creativity with Children and Families, Worcester, MA: Davis Publications, p. 176.