The Power of Documentation
Making the curriculum visible in the classroom and other appropriate areas of the school sends a powerful message to allchildren, families, and communitythat what young children learn and do is important. As mentioned in Chapter 2, visual documentation of learning is a concept associated with and highly developed in the Reggio Emilia programs (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998). Essentially, Reggio Emilia teachers construct displays that recount what and how children learn during long-term project work. The displays include images, scripts of children’s words, teacher reflections, and examples of children’s work. They focus on how a project was initiated and how the children think about what occurred over time. Judy Helm (2007) describes this process for American teachers as “windows on learning.”
The use of visual documentation does not need to be restricted only to those programs that use an emergent curriculum or long-term project work. From a practical perspective, making curricular activities visible to others can be a powerful communications strategy in any early childhood setting. Visual documentation helps visitors understand the curriculum teaching from a developmental perspective, meeting children’s individual needs, and meeting learning standards and/or program outcomes.
Reggio Emilia-style documentation was originally constructed on panelsdisplay boards that included cut-and-pasted photographs and text accompanied by displays of two-dimensional work or pictures of three-dimensional work. More recently, selected projects have been published by Reggio Emilia in book form, including The Theater Curtain (2002); Reggio Tutti: A Guide to the City by the Children (2000); Everything Has a Shadow Except Ants (1999); The Future Is a Lovely Day (2001); and Dialogues with Places (2008).
With advances in user-friendly technologies, teachers now have at their disposal many options for creating documentation (Berson & Berson, 2010). Many tools are currently available that can serve to streamline the process and help families feel a part of the daily learning experiences of their children.