Three cheers to Susan for writing this book! Its timing is perfect—teachers are more ready than ever to use pedagogical documentation effectively to make children’s thinking and work visible. Susan offers exciting, practical suggestions for using familiar and new technological tools to create documentation that communicates with families and children.
Susan reminds us that documentation is more useful than as a display of interesting events in a classroom. With pedagogical documentation a teacher pays close attention to children’s thinking during the process of inquiry into a topic. A teacher listens and responds as children question, explore, interact, pose theories, and investigate.
Susan shows us how documentation is an act of reciprocity wherein a teacher offers her response to children’s work through photos, narration, and speculation. Documentation is collaboration – when shared with a child it too becomes an object of study. Documentation is pedagogical practice that helps teachers reach beyond their certainties to consider what may be possible. We are sensitized to what is our edge and are helped to vision what may be.
Pedagogical documentation honors and respects children’s thinking and capacities.
Review
by: Gretchen Reynolds,
Early Childhood Education, Algonquin College