Why Am I In All Of These Pictures? From Learning Stories to Lived Stories. The Politics of Children’s Rights

Lynn McNair, John Davis, Cara Blaisdell, Luke Addison

Research output: Working paper

Abstract / Description of output

Pedagogical documentation is a complex terrain that practitioners, children and families navigate. However, acknowledging the complexity of documentation should not become an excuse to disregard social injustices within documentation practices. In this paper, we trouble the discourse around one particular approach to democratic, participatory documentation---Learning Stories. We examine how a Learning Stories approach was put into practice at one Scottish nursery, reporting the findings of a small action research project. Despite the democratic intentions of the stories, the research project found tensions regarding the political nature of children’s authorship of stories. We argue that even democratic approaches to documentation can reproduce exclusions, such as the exclusion of children’s voices as official authors of their own stories, or of children and families who are excluded from technological access. Similarly, Learning/Lived stories have the potential for explicit challenge to the normalisation and erasing of difference found in mainstream early childhood discourses, but do not automatically do so.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Publication series

NameEECERA

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Learning Stories, participation, children’s rights, early childhood, social justice, documentation

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