This article explores pedagogical documentation as a situated and speculative practice in early childhood education. Drawing on philosophical concepts including Heidegger’s Dasein, Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-minoritarian, and the idea of decentering the child, the paper examines how documentation shapes educators’ pedagogical thinking and relational ethics. Rather than focusing on how documentation shifts public views of early education, the article centers transformation as a lived, ethical, and pedagogical process. Through the Fishpond curriculum project, we attune to moments of pedagogical intra-action where documentation participates in the material-discursive reconfiguring of relations, generating speculative possibilities for thinking-with children, educators, and a pedagogist. The article positions documentation as a generative site of struggle that unsettles normative representational logics and sustains pedagogical matterings as ongoing processes of becoming.

Pedagogical documentation has undoubtedly inspired novel and ethically responsive practices in early childhood education. However, it has also contributed to legitimizing logics that have lost their experimental vitality. This article addresses this paradox through two movements. First, the authors create a “conceptual stitch” by which to reconnect documentation, relationally and conceptually, with pedagogy and progettazione. Second, they propose four ideas for rethinking documentation through this conceptual stitch. In making these moves, the authors seek to restore documentation’s relational integrity and open space for education’s pedagogical possibilities beyond the obscure and the normative.

This paper explores the dissonance between intention and implementation in the practice of pedagogical documentation, where early childhood educators display written, polished, and concluded learning events to meet expectations of completion rather than inquiry. It explores how photography and multimodal approaches can reconceptualize pedagogical documentation as a processual practice that attends to what is not yet formed in learning experiences rather than rushing to categories, interpretation, and conclusion. Pedagogical documentation’s meaning making emerges in the act of encounter. When embraced through multimodalities such as visual, performative, oral, and embodied languages, it becomes a generative force rather than a static representation. Through the weaving of photos into this paper, photography is examined as an act of relational mutuality rather than a practice that tends to isolate learning events from their web of relations and then reflect on them disconnected from the very relationships that give them meaning. In this way, the author argues that pedagogical documentation becomes an ethical form of attention that resists reductionist approaches when attending to learning still in nascent form. This paper grapples with conventional pedagogical documentation practices that privilege written narratives and photographs as extractions—as if learning could be captured and held still—and opens toward a relational, emergent approach that keeps pedagogical moments alive and living.

The discourse on pedagogical documentation inspired by the municipal preschools in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia is currently travelling around the world. The fact that this discourse has become so prominent can largely be seen as a resistance towards the reform development that has taken place internationally within the educational system since the 1990s, a reform development linked to global economic competition in the shape of new forms of quality assurance instruments connected to the ideology and policy of neoliberalism. In the article, three constructions of pedagogical documentation are described that can be seen as a form of resistance towards the above educational reforms.

This article seeks to explore a process of ongoing engagement with classroom documentation, returning to pieces of data and drawing on teaching experiences from a toddler classroom. In response to pervasive narratives in early childhood education that link practices of observation and documentation with accountability and assessment, a self-reflexive inquiry into the discursive forces that guide teachers’ representations of children is taken up. Drawing at times on feminist poststructural theories and new materialisms, imaginings for more expansive possibilities for reconceptualizing documentation are discussed.

With children aged 2–5, we explored concepts around the ephemeral, temporal, and intangible aspects of artistic encounters and what these things do to us during an inquiry project. We entered into this with curiosity about the ways in which the unplanned and unknown aspects of an artistic encounter might push inquiry forward in unexpected ways that always require some sort of response. Situated the research within a posthumanist perspective, we explored some of the ways art as an event makes possible the ways that art and curriculum can and should be considered co-constructors of inquiry and sense making. A significant part of the project worked to disrupt conventions around documentation or pedagogical narration and to push the researcher (as well as the children and educators) to think of how we might incorporate documentation as a living, moving, active part of the process during artistic encounters and/or inquiry.

By examining what transpires at school for children of mixed-status immigrant families in what is spoken and what is kept silent, Figueroa demonstrates students’ depth of understanding of their own immigration status and how it shapes their self-identity. Through this collaborative longitudinal research, citizenship and self-advocacy are explored in a manner that amplifies marginalized students’ voices and expertise.

This review of Alt Kid Lit: What Kids’ Literature Might Be, edited by Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason, explores the anthology’s analysis and reframing of children’s and young adult (CYA) literature that exists outside of normative print culture. The review focuses on the text’s emphasis on diversity and interdisciplinary approaches to critiquing mainstream print culture and the exclusionary world of CYA studies and publishing. Exploration of the book’s 13 essays, 2 interviews, and a panel discussion and the themes contained within reflects the pedagogical value inherent when marginalized perspectives and texts are given the attention they deserve. Overall, Alt Kid Lit is praised for its significant contributions to CYA scholarship and its potential to make lasting contributions in the work of scholars, educators, and librarians working with CYA literature and readers.

This paper explores the lived experiences of African/Black people, particularly within the context of a tri-citizen Ghanaian Nigerian, and Canadian scholar. Employing the concept of “wake work” inspired by Christina Sharpe’s notion of “sitting with” and gathering phenomena disproportionately affecting African/Black people, it utilizes archival methods to trace the ancestral disruptions, resistances, and ruptures in various spaces. Challenging Eurocentric narratives, it examines the colonization of Indigenous knowledge systems and the erasure of African spirituality. The research advocates for mandatory integration of African Indigenous education in early childhood programs, urging educators to support the heterogenous journeys of African/Black Indigenous communities to reclaim space, resist hegemonic discourses, and center African ways of knowing to foster empowerment, healing, and decolonization.