Progettazione and Documentation As Sociocultural Activities: Changing Communities of Practice

Abstract

Teachers in the municipally run infant–toddler and preprimary schools of Reggio Emilia have repeatedly demonstrated and described their schools as relational spaces where documentation makes visible children's learning and informs flexible planning, or progettazione. The purpose of this article is to reveal how teachers' and children's patterns of participation in the sociocultural activities of documentation and flexible planning changed, and concomitantly transformed the laboratory school community at the University of New Hampshire. This description is aimed at revealing the reciprocal, nested nature of change on both the school and individual levels, and between the two activities, from which a collegial and collaborative system of relationships developed. Within this relational system, new roles and responsibilities emerged, planning and documentation changed, and going public with documentation created new, potential spaces for flexible planning and shared learning.

Notes

¹Beginning in the early 1990s, large numbers of participants from around the world have traveledeach year to Reggio Emilia as members of week-long study tours, attended national and international conferences and symposia, and visited the “Hundred Languages of Children” traveling exhibit (Gandini, 2004, p. 14).

²For additional information on Reggio-inspired documentation, please refer to the annotated bibliographies at the end of this issue.

³The Child Study and Development Center has been in operation since 1929, is a National Association for the Education of Young Children-accredited laboratory school, and is known for educating teachers as classroom researchers. The center provides year-round programs to children from infancy to kindergarten from predominately middle-income families (there is a sliding fee scale aimed at widening the socioeconomic representation of families). Undergraduate students enroll in a series of four practica over 2 years, and can earn a prekindergarten-kindergarten teacher license, perfecting skills in authentic assessment and documentation (photography, video taping, scanning and analyzing classroom artifacts).

⁴Pseudonyms are used for all names except those of the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Jane Moran

Assistant Professor

Lisa Desrochers

Early Childhood Educator, is currently in East Africa working at an orphanage.

Nicole M. Cavicchi

Kindergarten teacher at the Child Study and Development Center at the University of New Hampshire.