Pedagogical documentation as a curriculum tool: making children’s outdoor learning visible in a childcare centre in Singapore

ABSTRACT

The Singapore government has laid out a regulation for daily minimum time spent outdoors and the Outdoor Learning Guide (OLG) to support children’s outdoor experiences in full-day childcare programmes. However, there is scarce research on young children’s outdoor learning experiences from children’s and teachers’ perspectives. This study aims to make sense of children’s outdoor learning using the child-sensitive tool – pedagogical documentation – in a Singapore childcare centre. It highlights the value of outdoor learning experiences for children as well as teachers’ views of outdoor learning through the implementation of pedagogical documentation. Pedagogical documentation as an in-depth, qualitative research approach has allowed us to generate two learning stories, revealing the impact of children’s outdoor learning experiences on their social-emotional development and learning dispositions. Additionally, the reflective discussions with teachers uncovered their perspectives of outdoor learning and pedagogical knowledge. Pedagogical documentation made children’s outdoor learning visible while keeping a balance between children’s and teachers’ voices.

KEYWORDS:

• early childhood curriculum
• learning stories
• outdoor learning
• pedagogical documentation
• professional learning

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the children and teachers who took part in this study. This paper is based on Xuan Ru Tan’s professional research project under the supervision of Dr Weipeng Yang. The authors also wish to thank the faculty at the Early Childhood Education Programme of Singapore University of Social Sciences for the field opportunity. Special thanks also go to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on previous versions of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).