Search

This article asks the question of what documentation is doing, rather than what documentation means in the context of early childhood education. By focusing on the documentation of a young child's playful exploration with water that inhabits a classroom wall, new materialist theories are put to work to ponder documentation's agentive capacities and intra-activities. What is argued is that documentation is inviting powerful creating and resisting actions that offer senses of belonging for a child. Consequently, it is proposed that teachers both shift from and overlay matters of fact and matters of concern. The implication is that documentation can be put to work in influential ways when its actions (rather than meanings) within spaces are foregrounded. This article offers original contributions to contemporary debates regarding agentive readings of documentation practices that can influence forms of ethical and flourishing pedagogies in a policy climate that can otherwise confine.

Reflexivity is recognized as an important constituent in how teachers build their professional knowledge and develop their pedagogical practice. However, less is known about the function that emotions play in the reflexive process and how these emotions can act as a catalyst to mobilize action that can create spaces for small activisms. Implicit activisms are here understood to involve small-scale gestures, such as speaking against discrimination, that can support notions of social justice. In this article, a reading of emotions is undertaken to explore how emotions such as discomfort can influence the speed and type of reaction for an early childhood specialist teacher during peer-to-peer mentoring. The concept of emotional geography is used to understand the way emotions relate to the distancing of others in one teacher's professional life and mobilize small-scale activism that can be interpreted as politically motivated.

In this paper, we ponder the ecologies of spacetimematterings folded into resistance practices and their relationality with figurations of agency outside and beyond datafication agendas. Accountability cultures bound up with datafication have consequences that include a diminished agency for both children and educators. We take inspiration from the idea that enactments of resistance can cause cracks to appear that forge creative spaces where different kinds of doings related to agency emerge. The context, potentiality and storyings of cracking encounters is where our interest lies. To ponder crackings, we play with feminist posthuman and materialist theorising with research-creation approaches to notice resistances as material-discursive intra-actions amongst the lively materiality of educational life. From there we notice resistance practices as ecologies. Those ecologies are complex and lively yet often concealed in more-than-human cracks by the grand narrative of datafication. Through storytelling, we reimagine these cracks as dynamic resistances, often unresolving the relationality between power and the collective more-than-human modes of resistance we witnessed. Different kinds of noticing mattered and amplifying the sharing of resistance stories brings attention to hopeful agencies already and always at work. Sharing stories can strengthen the connectivity of resistances to datafication and build a stronger autonomy and agency for early childhood education and care. Our provocation is to pay attention to the spacetimematterings of ecologies where resistance practices are already at work cracking cracks for different doings. From there, further activisms can mobilise a larger fracturing to the dominance of datafication narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document explores the concept of datafication in early childhood education and care (ECEC), highlighting how data has become integral to decision-making and assessment practices in the field. It discusses the global and local implications of datafication, emphasizing the need to critically examine its effects on children, educators, and communities. The Special Issue includes articles that analyze datafication practices in Mexico, Sweden, Finland, and England, offering diverse perspectives on the ethical implications and resistances to datafication in ECEC. The document concludes by calling for further research on the transformative potential of ethical data use and activism in early childhood education. [Extracted from the article]