The Risks of Reification: Using ‘Professional Risk’ to Understand Why and How Teachers Choose to Document (Some of) Children’s Ideas and Actions

Abstract

This chapter sets out to make a practical contribution to the discussion on power relations involved in documentation in early childhood education [ECE]. We suggest ‘professional risk’ as a key concept to understand why and how teachers materialise some of children’s actions and comments in various forms of documentation. The chapter builds on stories of two ECE settings—one Swedish preschool where a science project was documented as a public wall display, and one New Zealand kindergarten where a project about fairness and inclusion was documented in a variety of Learnings Stories in individual children’s portfolios. Our results indicate that the ideals of the ECE setting are likely to govern what teachers choose to document as examples of learning and behaviour. The two cases also highlight that topic matters. It may be riskier for teachers to document children’s ideas about socially sensitive topics like inclusion, compared to documenting children’s ideas about science. Furthermore, the cases indicate that form matters. For example, the narrative credit-based assessment form of a Learning Story seems to steer teachers to await a positive situation, where children’s actions fit with the notion of what is acceptable behaviour in the ECE setting, before they document children’s learning.