Documentation and analysis of children’s experience: an ongoing collegial activity for early childhood professionals

Abstract

Systematic documentation and analysis of educational practice can be a powerful tool for continuous support to the professionalism of early childhood education practitioners. This paper discusses data from a three-year action-research initiative carried out by a research agency in collaboration with a network of Italian municipal nido services. The action research aimed at elaborating and implementing documentation procedures that nido practitioners could accomplish continuously and that could form the basis of a collegial reflection on children’s experience and the improvement of practices. The analysis of practitioners’ discussions about weaknesses and strengths of the new procedures shows how they could be inscribed within the framework of their current professional engagement and support their processes of reflexivity. The analysis also highlights the important role of collegiality in sustaining practitioners’ analysis, evaluation and improvement of their practice.

Keywords:

• reflexivity
• professionalism
• documentation
• collegiality
• evaluation

Acknowledgements

This article analyses data from the action-research project ‘The quality of children’s experience in the nido’ conducted in collaboration by the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy and the Department of Education of the City of Pistoia, Italy. The authors wish to thank all the other participants in the project, for Pistoia: Rita Benedetto, Deborak Cappellini, Rossella Chietti, Annalia Fragai, Armanda Cassaresi, Franca Gualtieri, Gabri Magrini, Valentina Magni, Cristina Mariotti, Silvana Stroppa, Monica Tonini; for ISTC-CNR: Isabella Di Giandomenico and Patrizia Sposetti, as well as all the Pistoia nido practitioners. Special and warm thanks go to Anna Lia Galardini and Sonia Iozzelli, former Head of the Department of Education of the City of Pistoia, for offering the authors the opportunity to conduct the research-action study.

Notes

1. The guidelines are extensively illustrated in Di Giandomenico, Musatti, and Picchio (2011).