TY - UNPB
T1 - Why Am I In All Of These Pictures? From Learning Stories to Lived Stories. The Politics of Children’s Rights
AU - McNair, Lynn
AU - Davis, John
AU - Blaisdell, Cara
AU - Addison, Luke
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Learning Stories, participation, children’s rights, early childhood, social justice, documentation
M3 - Working paper
T3 - EECERA
BT - Why Am I In All Of These Pictures? From Learning Stories to Lived Stories. The Politics of Children’s Rights
ER -