Implications

As a consequence, a dialogue can be opened about how much detail and time needs to be spent on developing documentation, and that other forms of assessment can be put to work pedagogically when the vibrant and spatial potentialities of

documentation practices are foregrounded.

6.3. Implications

New materialist perspectives on documentation practices demonstrate that relatively new and abstract theories can bring fresh insights and potentialities. Along with Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010), I am inspired by Barad’s (1999) view that the endeavours of researchers can have real consequences. I have addressed the practical and conceptual implications of new materialist definitions in the earlier discussion chapter, so this following commentary considers the wider implications to the field.

6.3.1. Implication 1: The connection between pedagogical

documentation and a pedagogy of listening is limiting

New materialist perspectives do more than make learning visible in documentation practices. The association between pedagogical documentation and making learning visible is a view consistently made by key researchers in the field (Rinaldi, 2006; Reggio Children and Project Zero 2011; Carr et al. 2016). I build on previous research (Elfström Pettersson, 2018; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Kummen, 2014; Pacini- Ketchabaw et al. 2015) who concur that documentation practices work within and between human and non-human spaces and temporalities in an assemblage of children, teachers and families, classroom furniture, architectures and pedagogical material and policy drivers that make up and influence everyday practices.

Seeing documentation practices within an intra-active pedagogy (Lenz Taguchi, 2010) enables researchers to look beyond the experience of the child and acknowledge that those experiences are part of a wider vibrant assemblage. Extending the view to the intra-activity between children with a fuller range of non-human elements may well

add richness to what is understood by concepts such as ‘listening’ and ‘voice’ because it asks teachers to know and respond to children’s voices as enfolded into a more than human dynamic.

6.3.2. Implication 2: New materialist theories open up dialogue

about the actions and forms of documentation practices within classroom

spaces.

New materialist theories open up new conversations about the possible actions that documentation can have in classrooms. From this position, the forms and types of documentation become less important. In addition, the amount of detail in

documentation is problematised. This is relevant because critiques of how to put pedagogical documentation into practice have centred on the time and effort it requires, particularly within pressurised policy contexts (Basford and Bath, 2014).

What documentation does is the dynamic element that is foregrounded, and what moves into the background and is thus less relevant is what assessment or policy agendas it has been created within. Shifting the value to the intra-actions that are generated rather than the interpretations that are made through documentation practices opens up new potentialities for ECE teachers to recognise the agential nature of documentation. Such pedagogical knowledge can be recognised

straightforwardly in the classroom context. Documentation has been long recognised as a powerful pedagogical tool (Rinaldi, 2006; Dahlberg and Moss, 2006; Reggio Children and Project Zero, 2011).

Yet the application of pedagogical documentation has been hampered in the case of the English policy context with the pressures that are exerted on teachers to track and report data on a narrowing range of developmental aspects of learning (Roberts- Holmes and Bradbury, 2016). The practice knowledge of the agential nature of documentation underlines the entanglements between what teachers choose to document and how they put that material together (Elfström Pettersson, 2017; Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Consequently, documentation can be considered as an apparatus for creating knowledge and part of that knowledge can encompass the spatial and

temporal influences it can have within classroom spaces, regardless of what form or type of documentation it originated as.

6.3.3. Implication 3: Documentation practices act collectively within

spaces

The concept of documentation practices beyond a pedagogy of listening has led to an appreciation of the idea that documentation is not necessarily viewed as operating as an individual or singular entity. Individual pieces of documentation do not work in isolation in the findings. Rather, groupings of related documentation work together agentially with the human and non-human elements within classroom spaces and through temporalities. Michelle’s comment that ‘my room is a whole documentation of learning’ exemplifies the collective potential of documentation, which turned around and exponentially expanded the research enquiry.

Documentation acts within and between complex intra-actions amongst human and non-human elements in assemblage according to Merewether (2018). Hence, the thesis contributes knowledge as a theorisation of documentation as

spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007, 2013), but also as a kind of vibrant matter within “groupings of diverse elements of all sorts. Assemblages are living throbbing

confederations” (Bennett, 2010 p.23). Thus, spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007, 2013) is a valuable concept within new materialist perspectives of ECE practices. Likewise, the time and places that both documentation and groupings of documentation occupy are as significant as the subject and intention.

6.3.4. Implication 4: Documentation practices are put to work by

expert players

Seeing documentation practices as performative and agential within a pedagogical spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007, 2013) is a compelling way for teachers to put to work their pedagogies and offers the potential to expand the view about what and whose knowledges are valued in ECE. The how, where and what of documentation practices is significant, what is placed where and at which time can have differing intra-actions and influences. Documentation practices are thus doing critical work on behalf of teachers to both internal and external stakeholders.

Performatively, documentation practices act to affirm and give value to selected aspects of knowledge. As a result, the intra-actions can offset criticism of non- specialist school colleagues and resist challenge of formal learning approaches by asserting the value of playful pedagogies and breaking down the dichotomy between formalised and playful learning. In effect, this blurs the distinction between play and learning and aligns with material feminist theorising that disrupts binary thinking (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Lenz Taguchi, 2008). The use of hashtags in

documentation shared by teachers on social media platforms is a potent actant in this respect, as the words and phrases empower the teacher to evoke what knowledge matters to her pedagogical values. Examples in the data point to how Michelle

employs certain phrases and terms (#creative, #unique, #individual) that are attached to visual imagery in her use of social media. For that reason, the terms and phrases point to an accessible means of crystallising the values that Michelle attaches to children’s playful learning endeavours.

The agential nature of documentation practices reaches out to children and families enfolding them into the school world with powerful messages of belonging and value. How families attain a sense of belonging and value have been associated with the materiality of place in Somerville’s (2013) research, that claims materiality has the potential to be aligned with the raising of aspirations in areas of low socio-economic status. The teachers in this thesis associated their documentation practices with raising aspiration and the longer-term regeneration of their local community. School is positioned here as a hopeful and aspirational space, rather than reinforcing

disadvantage and notions of underachievement, although it is important to note that disadvantage has many more complex social, political and economic roots and remedies.

How far teachers are able to act back against the power accountability agendas exert and the risks that might engender are highly relevant to this argument. For many teachers the idea of challenging their assessment practices is just a risk too far. Nevertheless, the everyday act of positioning documentation and the possible affect that might engender for families and children is a highly accessible idea and

through applications of new materialist theory. In addition, the findings provide an example of how a relational study can meaningfully explore the structural

connections that underpin assemblages such as within the assessment agenda, that De Freitas (2017) believes have been neglected within relational ontologies.

Furthermore, this notion offers a realistic kind of weapon in ECE classroom practice armoury that might counter policy intensification and repositions aspects of the accountability agenda into a discourse shaped by the teacher, rather than something that teachers react to and are constrained by.

In turn, practice could be simplified by disrupting the policy logic of assessment always being associated with the notion that learning and developmental progress are captured in defined steps against prescribed goals. In addition, this model has the potential to provide a hopeful and achievable practice for teachers to feel a sense of control by loosening the concept of assessment shaping them into an instrument of the state, and reconnecting their documentation practices to their own pedagogical values. Documentation that is connected to pedagogical values is very much in keeping with Reggio philosophies (Rinaldi, 2006), however it is always questionable how far Reggio philosophies can transfer across social-political contexts. This seems an important contribution to knowledge in the presentation of a small team of teachers constructing versions of practice that align with their beliefs and taking a joyful glee in that construction. A positive construction of practice has added relevancy in a period where ECE teachers have a compromised professionalism because their accommodation of assessment agendas within the English policy context have forced an embattled identity, who lacks agency and is compliant and cynical (Bradbury, 2012).