Abstract
Pedagogical documentation has been understood as an important way for early childhood educators to provide high-quality learning environments for children. The authors explore the contested nature of quality and its interpretation in two cultural contexts: in Western Australia, where pedagogical documentation is a relatively uncommon practice, and in Sweden, where pedagogical documentation is a relatively common practice. These locations were selected to provide a comparison between educators from these two different cultural and policy contexts. The main purpose of pedagogical documentation within the Swedish preschool system is to gain knowledge of how to systematically improve the quality of the preschool. This contrasts with the demands on Australian early childhood educators to ensure children meet achievement standards in the Foundation Year. Six preschool educators in each country responded to interview questions regarding what enables or hinders their systematic quality work. The participants in both countries were using some form of pedagogical documentation in their professional practice. This article draws on interview data and elaborates on the ways these educators understood the role of pedagogical documentation in what they regarded as systematic quality work. The findings provide insight into the impact of both policy and cultural contexts on individual educators' practices when using pedagogical documentation as a means to promote quality. The results indicate that differences in early childhood education policies between countries may lead to important differences in how pedagogical documentation is used by educators in their practice.
Introduction and background
In this article, we examine early childhood educators' reflections on their pedagogical practices in relation to quality and pedagogical documentation in Sweden and Western Australia. The study investigates educators' conceptualisations of the term ‘quality’ and their use of ‘pedagogical documentation’, which are significant since much of the current policy guiding early childhood provision and the evaluation of its effectiveness is centred on ‘quality’ (Australian Children's Education, 2018; Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2018). The term ‘quality’ has been strongly contested in the literature (Dahlberg et al., 1999; Moss, 2016; Paananen and Lipponen, 2018), so in this article we seek to understand how educators problematise and apply this term in their daily practices. Since the term ‘quality’ is laden with multiple meanings and interpretations, we explored how early childhood educators using pedagogical documentation understand the term ‘quality’, and in what ways this understanding influences their practice and their systematic work towards improving quality. In particular, we investigate this in relation to the policy documents that the educators are working with. In the two research contexts – Sweden and Western Australia – early childhood education emanates from different traditions.
Aim and research question
Our research was designed to investigate the impact of the policy goals of early childhood education on the practice of using pedagogical documentation in systematic quality work in two different cultural and policy contexts. The manner in which the policy goals of early childhood education shape educators' understandings about quality and their deployment of pedagogical documentation is the focus of the study. Our overarching research question is: How do early childhood educators in Sweden and Western Australia make sense of their practice in terms of quality and pedagogical documentation?
The Swedish and Western Australian contexts
In Sweden, like in the other Nordic countries and central European countries, preschool has a social pedagogy tradition (Schugurensky and Silver, 2013), which emphasises lifelong learning and combines care, learning and upbringing. Swedish preschools are governed by the Education Act (Ministry of Education, 2010) and a national curriculum (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018) which sets out the goals that early childhood settings should strive to attain. These goals are not focused on individual achievement, but on what educators in the early years setting should offer to support children's growth and learning. A revision to the Swedish curriculum in 2010 emphasised linguistic and mathematical knowledge and learning about science and technology. The government considered these to be areas where preschool was able to prepare children for compulsory schooling. Despite this more recent focus on these four knowledge areas, the Swedish curriculum still does not contain explicit goals for children to achieve, the importance of both caring and play being explicitly highlighted (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018). The Swedish curriculum stresses that ‘[t]he purpose of evaluation is to acquire knowledge of how the quality of the preschool, i.e. its organisation, content and implementation, can be developed so that each child is given the best possible conditions for development and learning’ (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018: 19). To support the work of educators, pedagogical documentation has been used in Swedish preschools since the late 1980s (Dahlberg et al., 1999). In 2008, more than half of the head teachers nationally sent their preschool staff on pedagogical-documentation courses (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2008).
In Australia, the national curriculum prescribes the content for the Foundation Year (five-year-olds), and there are expectations that children develop certain skills and content knowledge in foundation learning areas in preparation for primary school (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2018). For children from birth to age five, an Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) is also mandated (Department of Education, 2009). These documents span children enrolled in prior-to-school settings such as long day care, kindergarten and preschool, hence the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and EYLF documents overlap when children are five years old. Unlike the Swedish curriculum, the Australian Curriculum contains achievement standards in the Foundation Year (the year before Year 1), such as: ‘Recognise and name all upper and lower case letters (graphemes) and know the most common sound that each letter represents’ (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2018). There is some confusion among educators about which document to draw on in the lower years of school, and little understanding among school-based educators of the nature of the EYLF used in prior-to-school settings (Davies, 2018). There is also recognition from peak bodies in early childhood education that the two documents ‘are both operating in the early childhood education arena in various ways’ (Connor, 2013).
Unlike Sweden, there is not a strong history of working with pedagogical documentation in Western Australia. In government schools, there has been no systematic professional learning for educators to support this. Within the private-school sector, more opportunities appear to have been available for educators to undertake professional learning in this area.
A major difference between the Swedish preschool and the Australian Foundation Year (both cater for five-year-olds) is that the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018) sets goals for a preschool education, not for the children. The Australian EYLF (Department of Education, 2009) identifies outcomes that highlight individualistic rather than collective goals of education. Children are viewed as ‘confident and involved learners’ and ‘effective communicators’ who ‘contribute to their world’ (Department of Education, 2009: 3–4).
Pedagogical documentation
Pedagogical documentation can be understood from many perspectives, since it is both content and a process (Dahlberg et al., 1999). As ‘content’, documentation may consist of written notes, audio and video recordings, photographs or children's artwork, for example. The content of the documentation describes what children say and do, and how educators relate to children and their actions. Pedagogical documentation as a ‘process’ refers to educators using this content as a basis for reflection with colleagues, children and parents (Dahlberg et al.,1999). The documentation becomes pedagogical when it is reflected on and used for making decisions about how to proceed in the learning and teaching program. Pedagogical documentation is distinct from documentation because it is used as a catalyst for reflection, which enables educators, children and parents to discuss, interpret and reflect about what learning and thinking has happened from multiple points of view (Dahlberg et al., 1999; Lenz Taguchi, 2013; Rinaldi, 2006). Documentation as a narration supports educators in their dialogue with colleagues to use multiple theoretical perspectives in order to understand children's learning processes (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). Pedagogical documentation can also be used to support relational learning by using the documentation as children's collective memory and a meeting point for their different experiences and knowledge (Bjervås and Emilson, 2017).
Pedagogical documentation does not claim to be the true story about what has happened. Instead, it should be perceived as a subjective social construction. As active subjects and participants, educators and children co-construct and co-produce the documentation (Dahlberg et al., 1999). In this sense, interactions between adults and children influence interpretations of what has happened (Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Merewether, 2018). This process was understood in Iorio's (2006) work as an aesthetic conversation.
There are several studies that highlight the benefits and problems in educators' work with pedagogical documentation. The work with documentation can be either an obstacle or supportive for educators and children, depending not only on how it is carried out and what is documented, but also on how educators understand and use it further in their work (Alvestad and Sheridan, 2015; Bjervås, 2011). Pedagogical documentation may support educators in their professional development (De Sousa, 2019; Löfgren, 2017), helping them to be aware of their own competence, evaluate the quality of their own work and enhance learning (Sheridan et al., 2013). Educators may also gain a broader image of children and what they have learned, compared to when they use checklists (Bjervås, 2011). Beyond what is learned, pedagogical documentation also makes the process of learning visible and influences how educators might assess learning in early years settings (Bjervås, 2011; Buldu, 2010; Guidici et al., 2001).
One important aspect of pedagogical documentation is the need for ethical considerations. Lindgren (2012: 338) claims that documentation is ‘a child-centred approach with adults in the dominant position’. The same point of view is expressed by Dahlberg and Moss (2005), who argue that there is a risk that pedagogical documentation can be used for better controlling children, instead of challenging what is taken for granted. When educators visualise children through using pedagogical documentation, they always need to pose questions about these ethical issues (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005).
What constitutes quality in early childhood settings?
The concept of ‘quality’ would seem to be related to beliefs about what constitutes a ‘good’ society and a ‘good’ childhood (Paananen and Lipponen, 2018). Hence, the term ‘quality’ is problematic and cannot be considered as a neutral word or one that embodies an agreed set of meanings (Dahlberg et al., 1999). In order to challenge the discourse of a universal and mutually understood meaning of ‘quality’, it is necessary to explore what is understood by quality in educational practice – namely, ‘the discourse of meaning making’ (Dahlberg et al., 1999: 167). This is a discourse that deals with choices concerning ethical, philosophical and value-related questions. Moreover, these discourses can be understood as emanating from different views of learning. The ‘discourse of quality’ explains that learning is reproducing predetermined knowledge, where an expert transmits this knowledge. The ‘discourse of meaning making’ instead emphasises socially constructed learning that is generated with others (Dahlberg et al., 1999: 167). This distinction appears to be a point of differentiation between the Australian and Swedish early childhood policy documents and resultant pedagogical practices we report in this article.
These interpretations of quality and their translation into policy and practice represent an area that has not previously been investigated. There are no studies comparing the practice of documentation in jurisdictions with distinctly different goals for early childhood education, as we have identified between Sweden and Australia. Thus, the study reported here provides a unique contribution to the growing body of research literature examining the role, function and efficacy of pedagogical documentation. We do this by providing analysis of the ways in which policy and curriculum documents frame what it means to provide a quality early childhood education in two different countries, and the ways these understandings and expectations shape the everyday documentation practices of educators.
Theoretical framework
In order to frame our research, we draw on the critical social theory of Habermas (1978, 1987, 1990), specifically his work on ‘knowledge interests’ and the concepts of ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’.
According to Habermas (1978), there are three forms of knowledge interests: ‘technical’, ‘practical’ and ‘critical’. ‘Technical’ knowledge interests reproduce existing understandings and practices, while ‘practical’ knowledge interests seek to reform the meanings people ascribe to existing understandings and experiences, and ‘critical’ knowledge interests raise questions to challenge existing knowledge structures and transform them in an emancipatory way. In the forthcoming section, we will explain how the framework of knowledge interests enables us to interpret educators' beliefs about quality through the lens of the values, culture and society in which their pedagogical practice takes place. We apply these knowledge interests to the notion of quality work in the context of early childhood education in Sweden and Western Australia.
In order to gain a deeper understanding of educational practices in this study, we draw on Habermas's concepts of ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’, which he points out to be two aspects of society. According to Habermas (1987), we need to comprehend society from a holistic point of view, as a system and as a lifeworld. The ‘system’ follows an independent and objectified logic and comprises the part of society that refers to the economy and the state. The system is not connected with people's immediate cultural context (Habermas, 1987, 1990). When it comes to early childhood settings, documents that steer educational practice, such as curriculum and policy documents, emanate from the system. Emilson (2017) highlights that early childhood settings as societal institutions are a part of the system and, as a consequence, are controlled by politically decided laws, rules and local professional praxis.
In the concept of ‘lifeworld’, Habermas (1987, 1990) includes culture, society and personality. The lifeworld is a store of linguistically acquired knowledge, which people use for interpreting communication in their contexts. This store of knowledge contains cultural understandings that are not consciously considered (Habermas, 1990). The lifeworld can be understood as taken for granted and as something we live within and cannot be outside. However, the lifeworld is not static since it is both constructed and reconstructed through communicative actions, which give it a strong subjective character (Emilson, 2017). The everyday life of early childhood settings is included in the educator's and children's lifeworlds. Even though Habermas (1990) emphasises that the system and the lifeworld are complementary, importantly, he put forward that the system can colonise the lifeworld. This could happen when political decisions are transformed to actions in the educational practice in early childhood settings. Having the lifeworld in focus does not mean disregarding systemic circumstances; they must be considered together (Emilson, 2017). Using Habermas's double perspective (system and lifeworld) in pedagogical research, it is possible to get beyond focusing on either only the society or only the individual. Instead, it enables a view of the intersection between the society and the individual. In this study, we adopt this double perspective with regard to the use of pedagogical documentation as a part of systematic quality work in early childhood settings. In our study, this means that we explore how the system (different policy or curriculum documents) influences the lifeworld (what happens in educational practice) in early childhood settings in Sweden and Western Australia.
We also recognise that knowledge is constructed by, and mediated through, social, cultural and linguistic processes (Vygotsky, 1978). An ontological point of view for the study is Bakhtin's (1984, 1986) idea that, although utterances are individual, they are dialogic. Utterances are interconnected through dialogue with other utterances, both with voices from the past and with future voices. Bakhtin (1981) argues that there are authoritative voices that exclude other voices. This means that there are limits to what can be said in a particular context at a certain time. Based on Bakhtin's reasoning, the educators' statements in our research are not understood as individual voices but instead as dialogic statements expressed in a specific context and at a specific time. How educators talk about their lifeworld and the impact of the system in their educational practice in early childhood is influenced by dialogic voices in this specific context, and not only individual ideas.
Methodology
As members of distinct cultural and linguistic groups (Swedish and Australian), the educators and the researchers in this study bring different sociocultural lenses (Rogoff, 1997) and multiple perspectives to our experiences and daily work in early childhood education and care. We invited educators to share these multiple meanings and interpretations of their work via open-ended interview questions. In turn, the researchers conducted a joint analysis that further explored these socially constructed meanings, acknowledging our own cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In the process of analysis, we overlaid the responses of the educators with our own dialogue about the meanings ascribed to the utterances of the ;participants. A rich and profound exchange of meanings and interpretation resulted, whereby shared meanings were identified, and disparate and multiple meanings unpacked and language nuances clarified.
Methods
A case study (Yin, 2012) was undertaken in each country with early childhood educators working with children aged three to five. Using semi-structured interviews, we sought to ascertain rich descriptions of experiences and practices with regard to quality and pedagogical documentation in the two contexts.
Participants
Educators were invited to take part in the study on the basis that they were using some form of documentation in their professional practice. We used our professional networks to identify participants and acknowledge that this selection is by nature not generalisable. Six Swedish preschool educators and six Australian kindergarten educators participated in the study. In Swedish preschools, pedagogical documentation is a common practice, and the selection of the participants was made based on the researcher's knowledge of the settings using this practice. In Western Australia, pedagogical documentation is far less common. The Western Australian participants were therefore selected on the basis that they were using some form of pedagogical documentation.
The Western Australian kindergarten is approximately equivalent to the Swedish preschool in terms of the age of the children attending (three to five). A total of 12 educators were interviewed. We acknowledge that the selection of the participants renders the findings of our study limited to the cases we describe. They cannot be generalised but may provide indicative data on trends in each country.
Semi-structured interviews
The researchers drew on the literature, our anecdotal experience as early childhood educators ourselves and our scholarly experience as teacher educators to arrive at a set of preliminary interview questions. After revisiting the literature and engaging in further discussion and clarification about the particular cultural milieu of each country, the questions were revisited and refined in order to create multiple entry points for discussion and opportunities for educators to describe and reflect on their beliefs and practices in relation to quality and pedagogical documentation. The interview questions were provided to the teachers in advance of the interviews. This was a decision the researchers made in order to give the teachers time to reflect on the questions and consider examples that they might share to illustrate their ideas. The questions asked the practitioners to convey their understandings in relation to what quality means in early childhood education; how they work to improve quality; how they document children's learning; and with whom they communicate the documentation. We also asked them to discuss how the responsibility for improving quality was shared in their settings.
Research ethics
All of the educators provided written consent to participate in the study and, in the Australian settings, ethical clearance from the university's ethics committee was sought and approved. In the Swedish settings, the participants were informed about the study in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the Swedish Research Council (2017).
Data analysis
The data from the interviews was transcribed and analysed in several phases. The Swedish transcripts were translated into English for ease of communication between the researchers. The first phase of analysis was reading each interview transcript repeatedly and identifying utterances relating directly to pedagogical documentation and quality. The second phase of analysis was to ‘pool’ the data (Marton, 1986) in order to identify patterns and themes among the teachers' discourses. In this way, the data from the two countries was first de-identified, and was read only in terms of content rather than context. In the next step, we paid attention to the identified discursive differences and similarities in relation to the two contexts – Sweden and Western Australia.
We drew on content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005) to develop themes from the educators' responses. The researchers approached this process of analysis by first identifying themes individually, then cross-checking and refining the themes with one another to ensure reliability. This enabled us to identify a range of mutually derived themes, thereby drawing on inductive content analysis (Elo and Kyngäs, 2008).
Findings
In this section, we discuss each of these themes, drawing attention to similarities and differences between the two cohorts of teachers and the ways they make sense of their practice in terms of quality and pedagogical documentation. In accordance with our ontological point of view (Bakhtin, 1984, 1986), we do not render our findings to individuals. However, we use selective quotes that are commonly held among the participants to illustrate the views among the participants from each cohort.
Views about quality
We asked the educators to talk with us about how they work to systematically improve quality in their setting. The educators from both countries shared a mutual set of understandings about quality in terms of the following elements: developing positive relationships, creating a warm and well-resourced learning environment, engaging in meaningful interactions with children, and the importance of identifying and following children's interests. Likewise, the educators in both groups identified professional learning and having a strong theoretical and research basis for decision-making as important components of quality. An illustrative quote from Western Australia is ‘it's that “teacher as a researcher”, constantly trying to strive to learn about best practice, interpreting theory and translating it into practice', while an exemplary quote from a Swedish educator highlights the common view of the need for ‘keeping up with the latest research’.
The discussion about ‘quality’ highlighted a significant distinction between the two groups of educators when it came to the role of children in documentation. As a group, the Swedish educators described quality as the work with the children in documentation – inviting children to contribute to and actively reflect on documentation about their learning processes. One Swedish educator's quote explains this commonly held view: ‘We share documentation back with the children and follow up the children's thoughts and hypotheses'. Involving children in this process was viewed as a key aspect of quality – for example, an educator explained that she ensured quality by prioritising: ‘Every day there are these contexts for planning and reflecting, both between children and pedagogues and between children’.
On the other hand, all but one of the Western Australian early childhood educators saw quality as the work about the children. The majority of the educators described quality as being about listening to children (the lifeworld), but with a strong focus on the mandated curriculum (the system). An exemplary quote from one of the Western Australian educators illustrates this: ‘The children's interests drive our program but also having a really good understanding of the national curriculum and the EYLF so that we know that we're covering everything'. This statement also highlights the manner in which the ACARA curriculum and the EYLF have been used by educators simultaneously in the kindergarten year, despite the content-oriented ACARA document being intended for use in the year after kindergarten.
It appears, then, that the distinction between these two groups of educators in relation to quality is predominantly in response to the demands of the ‘system’. The participating educators in Sweden were directed by policy to achieve goals for the setting and they saw children as part of the quality process, while most of the Western Australian educators in our study focused on ‘covering’ the content prescribed by the curriculum. Thus, the children were the recipients of learning, and the documentation is about them rather than with them.
Improving quality: the role of pedagogical documentation
During the interviews, we asked the educators to describe how they document children's learning. Both the Swedish and Australian educators in our study shared a view that documentation is important for reflecting on pedagogy in an effort to understand how their actions as educators influence what happens in the learning processes of children. The Swedish participants identified pedagogical documentation as a tool for self-reflection and feedback – as a means to first review their own practice and then analyse and explore different points of view about their work with children. A Swedish educator exemplified this view, emphasising the importance of being able to ‘reflect on your own practice using other educators’ way of thinking'. Another Swedish educator described pedagogical documentation as a source of ‘collective memory’, whereby everyone in the setting is part of the documentation process. A third Swedish educator pointed out that they have ‘special walls where the project is communicated’, and stressed that ‘everybody doesn't need to do everything, but everyone should have the opportunity to think about everything'. The collective and shared practice of pedagogical documentation was valued by the Swedish educators in our study and is directly linked to their notions of quality.
Most of the Western Australian educators who were interviewed held a very different view from the Swedish educators in relation to the role of pedagogical documentation as a means for improving quality. They described it as a means primarily for checking children's knowledge acquisition – that is, to assess and evaluate children's learning. Some of the educators described pedagogical documentation as a way to check that the children had learned specific concepts. One educator, for example, explained her understanding that pedagogical documentation was important because it helped her monitor and record children's achievement against external outcomes: Some children are really not quite getting certain concepts and why do we think this is? Is it because of the way we're teaching? Or the way we're using drill and practice? How can we improve that teaching or how can we improve that practice with that certain group of children?
Just one Western Australian educator recognised that improving quality depended on an embedded and ‘living culture’ in the entire school, rather than an individual's pursuit of quality. This educator worked in a setting where such a culture of learning was pervasive. It was more difficult for the other Western Australian educators who were interviewed. They spoke about how isolated they were in their practice within their schools, where they were the only educators using pedagogical documentation. One Western Australian educator encapsulated the isolation that many experienced: ‘I'm at a disadvantage here where I don't have another colleague. It's only myself [sic]. You know, I'm the kindergarten teacher … I don't have anyone other than my education assistant that I can chat to'. She did not share her documentation with the children in a reflective dialogue, but used it as a record of what had been taught.
The major differences between the two contexts appear to be in relation to the purpose of documentation and with whom the documentation is shared. This has important implications in light of our theoretical framework drawing on Habermas. The Swedish participants would be characterised as adopting ‘critical’ knowledge interests, since they see quality as an outcome of shared meaning-making between educators and children and educators and their peers. Further, they are empowered at the system level by a national curriculum that puts forward goals to work towards, rather than goals to achieve. By contrast, the Western Australian participants tended to focus on quality being primarily understood as an outcome of ‘technical’ or ‘practical’ types of knowledge interests driven by the curriculum, which might be recorded using pedagogical documentation. Like their counterparts in Sweden, the Western Australian educators appeared to be responding in their practice to the requirements of the Australian education system, which requires children to achieve particular knowledge and skills. However, some of these educators were choosing to prepare children early for the content-driven ACARA curriculum they would encounter the following year, rather than working within the outcomes-oriented EYLF. The application of pedagogical documentation in the lifeworld of the Western Australian educators in this study is linked to the philosophical position about quality that the system puts forward through the curriculum.
Assessing children's learning
In response to an interview question about what is made visible and assessed in documentation, the Swedish participants emphasised making the ‘project’ the focus rather than the learning of individual children. Pedagogical documentation was, for these Swedish educators, mostly concerned with the progress of the project, the educator's work and the children's thinking processes. They described pedagogical documentation as a tool for working more effectively and reflectively, not for accountability. One of the educators summed up this shared view as follows: I don't like the word ‘assessment’. I don't want to judge and put forward ‘this is a fact’ about the child … I assess not the child but what we have done – to support the child – it is as much about assessing your own work as assessing children. What I'm assessing, I mean I do have a scope and sequence here that I need to do in English and maths, so I have the usual things. Like, I know what I've got to prepare them for prep, so syllables and I've got rhyming and phonics. Underneath the Play-Doh area, there will be a little sign. It will be a list of skills that you often see children practising at a Play-Doh table. So, you know, things like maths, all of those, literacy skills and I think that really helps … and on the back we usually have all the social skills and personal development skills.
Culture of the setting and support for pedagogical documentation
Support for pedagogical documentation within the setting had a profound influence on the practice of the research participants in both countries. They noted that if the principal (rector or head teacher) did not understand the purpose of pedagogical documentation, they were unsupportive of giving time or recognition to the work. On the other hand, if they did understand, they were either getting involved in a supportive way or delegating and trusting the teachers to do this competently.
Finally, both the Swedish and the Western Australian educators in this study noted that they struggled to get parents or caregivers involved in pedagogical documentation. They mentioned a number of factors contributing to this situation, such as lack of time or a limited understanding of the role they might play in co-constructing meanings about the learning taking place. They recognised that including parents' voices in documentation would deepen the picture of children's learning and strengthen the relationship between home and school, but agreed that this goal was logistically difficult to enact.
Discussion
The themes identified in our analysis point to a significant divergence in practice between Swedish and Western Australian early childhood educators. Based on Habermas's 1987 theory of system and lifeworld, we attribute these differences primarily to the impact of a mandated curriculum as a mechanism of the system, designed to shape the work of educators. The significant divergence in practice also illustrates Bakhtin's (1981) ideas about the dialogic and authoritative voices that exclude other voices. The lifeworld in the different settings is influenced by two different societies (systems) and different authoritative voices (curricula), which influence how the educators talk and act.
The extent to which the system colonises, and subsequently shapes, the lifeworld of the educators is evident, for example, in the marked difference in the understanding of the term ‘quality’ between the two groups (with the exception of one Western Australian educator). The Swedish educators appeared to have understood quality to be working with the children to document learning processes. This understanding reflects the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018), which is not focused on the individual child's achievement but on what educators in a setting are expected to offer children in order to support their growth and learning. The learning processes (rather than outcomes) documented are jointly constructed and understood collaboratively with children, which can be connected to what Habermas (1978) calls a ‘critical’ knowledge interest. This is further illuminated in the Swedish educators' understandings of the purpose of pedagogical documentation, which they used as a means to review their own practice.
On the other hand, the majority of the Western Australian educators understood quality to be about documenting for the children, with an eye to content-laden goals set out for children to achieve individually. We see their mandate under the EYLF (Department of Education, 2009) and the Australian Curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2018) reflected in these understandings. Compared to the Swedish educators, there was no talk of learning processes or shared meanings, and little about collaboration with children. Rather, most of the discussions focused on ‘covering content’ and ‘ticking off’ the learning by using checklists to ensure that external monitoring requirements were met. In this way, it appears that the majority of the Western Australian educators in this study applied the ‘technical’ and ‘practical’ knowledge interests mandated by the system (Habermas, 1978). These teachers saw their role as reporting about children's achievements in relation to the system's expectations. Thus, the role of pedagogical documentation was one of checking children's content knowledge and mastery, rather than being primarily a source of self-reflection for the educator. According to the data we have presented in this article, in Western Australia, among the teachers we interviewed, there appears to be a preference for using the notion of working towards the content-based ACARA curriculum over the outcomes-oriented EYLF. Of course, we cannot say that this view applies to all Western Australian teachers. However, it is reflective of the views of this group of educators, who were among the few who currently use pedagogical documentation in the state.
Comparing the policy documents in each country, we note that, in Swedish preschools, it is the early years setting as a whole (the educators, materials and interactions, not the children) that is expected to achieve the goals, while in Australia it is the children who are expected to achieve the goals with the educator's support. Our research finds that, in the settings we worked with, the different systems powerfully influence the lifeworlds of educators and children in early childhood education.
The notable exception in the Western Australian case was the educator who worked within the system but was able to limit the degree to which it colonised the lifeworld of her setting. This was possible because of a whole-school commitment to understanding learning processes, reflective practice and professional learning to support pedagogical documentation. This outlier in the Western Australian context illustrates the power of educators and settings to pursue critical knowledge interests to limit the colonising effects of the system on children's learning processes. This is much more difficult to achieve for individual educators with an interest in working with pedagogical documentation who are doing so in isolation and without support from their school administrators. A collaborative community of practice is essential for educators to work critically and transformatively with pedagogical documentation in early childhood settings.
Our aim in this research was to examine early childhood educators' reflections on their pedagogical practices in relation to quality and pedagogical documentation in two entirely different policy environments – Sweden and Western Australia. The study investigated educators' conceptualisations of the term ‘quality’ and their use of pedagogical documentation. We have understood, as a result of this investigation, that the cultural milieu and policy contexts of the educators who participated have a profound influence over how they view quality and what it is that they consider to be pedagogical documentation.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Libby Lee-Hammond https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9699-7508 Lise-Lotte Bjervås 