Chapter 6 Conclusion
6.2. Contribution to knowledge as a reworked definition of documentation practices
6.2.2. What does a new materialist perspective on documentation practice mean?
Figure 13 What does a new materialist perspective on documentation mean?
My definition finds that documentation practices are a form of vibrant matter, or a vital materiality (Bennett, 2010) with “trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own” (p.viii). I have found that documentation practices have a propensity to produce senses of belonging for children and families. This serves as an example in ECE
research of how the agency of a material such as documentation can be considered to produce helpful affects for humans, which Bennett (2010) theorises as both an ethical and political concern. Thus, I assert that this presents new thinking to the field in terms of Bennett’s (2010) ideas, as it demonstrates what the vitality of matter
produces and how it is helpful in the context of ECE. Researchers such as Merewether (2018) connect Bennett’s (2010) concept of vibrant matter to children’s engagement with natural spaces, however I extend that connection by considering documentation itself as vibrant. In addition, the reworked definition aligns with Lenz Taguchi’s (2010) perspective that documentation practices are performative agents within an intra- active pedagogy and through a material-discursive frame can resist dominant discourse.
However, the resistance of discourse operates within a policy landscape with complex sets of drivers at work on ECE teachers. Inevitably, the extent teachers can create
spaces for resistance operates within a navigation of policy. Opening up spaces for disruption through the material-discursive intra-actions of documentation exemplify how “sociopolitical ideologies of their time/space” are at work in the
documentation’s intra-actions and are thus influential (Jones et al. 2016, p.1153). How the teachers in this research work with and against discourses reveals something of their agency and decision making in action and builds on Jones at al. (2016)
theorisations by shifting the focus into the domain of an educational context that reveal some powerful dialectic at work.
Additionally, I argue that new materialism can shed light on practices that carve out those spaces for resistance and thus I align with researchers who take a performative view of documentation (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Lenz Taguchi, 2007, 2010) and have the potential for transformative capacity (Elfström Pettersson,
2015,2017,2018). The definition also aligns with Kummen’s (2014) view that
documentation can have transformative capacities through a shifting of the teacher gaze from a concern with documentation as part of the assessment agenda to
recognise the powerful actions it performs for children and families within classroom spatialities.
Furthermore, I depart from interpretations in which documentation practices are viewed as a capturing of intra-active events (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. 2015). Rather, I
extend Pacini-Ketchabaw et al.’s (2015) view of capturing and instead posit that documentation practices are creating intra-active events that ripple out diffractively within, without and beyond the school, particularly in regard to creating senses of belonging. In this frame, the documentation’s actions are creating effects that play with the individual, similar to how an individual can play with material. Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) contends that relational materialist theories open up this way of seeing, as humans are in relation with many other elements and “non-human forces are equally at play” (p.525). In the definition, documentation practices are not limited to opening up a dialogue for teachers about “materiality and the sociomaterial intra- action in children’s learning” (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. 2015 p.139). Rather, I extend
and sociomaterial entities performing beyond the confines of children’s learning and curriculum outlines.
In addition, the reworked definition offers new conceptualisations of the influence and subsequent actions resulting from intra-actions that documentation can make that shifts the teacher gaze (Lenz Taguchi, 2010 p.88). Elfström Pettersson (2015) uses similar thinking in her findings that documentation changes teachers focus from the child to preschool practice and also makes the point that matters relating to power relations can be overlooked when multiple elements are considered to be agential. The overlooking of power relations in new materialist research into documentation practices is a significant limitation of this theoretical framework and runs the risk of jeopardising a realistic and pragmatic language of practice emerging for everyday teachers. However, this opens up an opportunity to consider in what ways teachers act back within the policyscape and find spaces to resist and disrupt through their documentation practices. As teachers will have multiple pressures they might want to act against within the assessment agenda, they cannot resist everything. My research illuminates how three teachers went about their documentation and put it to work against discourses and practices that were most pressing to them, and this provides exemplification of how the “assessment game” is expertly played and thus extends
the research of Basford and Bath (2014 p.119).
Accordingly, I extend Elfström Pettersson’s (2015) finding by asserting that
documentation practices can find a space to resist by shifting the gaze in moving the teachers’ focus to a much broader horizon than school practice encompasses. In particular, this is exemplified by how digital enactments of documentation can act outside of the school and perform within and between local communities. The findings reveal how the digital enactments of documentation acted on a national stage that not only raised the status of the school through promoting their playful pedagogies, but also acted against limiting discourses associated with disadvantage. In particular, digital enactments of documentation exemplify how agential and performative frames can illuminate what documentation does (rather than what documentation means) and present a potential to open up a hopeful practice space for ECE teachers.