The Role of Pedagogical Documentation in Child and Parent Participation: An Investigation of Educator and Parent Perspectives in a Reggio Emilia-Inspired Preschool

Abstract

Pedagogical documentation can have a significant role in enabling participation in early childhood education. This study investigates child and parent participation in pedagogical documentation processes in a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool in the United States, which gives crucial importance to documentation in education philosophy. For this purpose, 10 early childhood educators were interviewed about their practices, and 15 parents from their classrooms responded to an online survey. Documentation examples (portfolios, newsletters, journals and bulletin boards) were also reviewed from each participant educator, which provided 701 entries for content analysis. The results showed that although educators employed documentation to increase child participation in their classrooms, interview, survey and document analysis all corroborated parents being mostly recipients in the documentation process. Differences were also found between parents' preferred content and actual content of documentations according to the comparison of the findings from the parent survey and content analysis, and implications were provided based upon them.