Tuesday 23 August 2016

Presentation for Ireland

Hello there




SLIDE 1

Today I am going to look at early childhood education documentation practices through the lens of recordkeeping.  As you all would know, documentation is a key element of early childhood education and is often used for reflection and planning activities.   Documentation can also form a key part of early childhood education reporting activities and is involved in some outputs including assessment. 
I should note at this point, that one of the aims of presenting my ideas at this forum is to seek feedback from early childhood educators on my observations to date.  I definitely do not have all the answers at this point, and I am only raising questions.  As I get further along with my research, I hope to present more answers.

But at this point of my research into early childhood education documentation practices has revealed to me – that documentation is a really fascinating type of recordkeeping.  When I talk about recordkeeping, what do I mean?  I will show you a definition shortly, but I thought instead of just definitions, I would start with some short clips from the BBC television series, Who Do You Think You Are?  As you may know, this show tracks the family history of celebrities, through storytelling and recordkeeping.  The show often utilises a mixture of personal recordkeeping and official recordkeeping to tell the family story.  The clips I am going to show you today, come from an episode featuring the famous Harry Potter author, J.K. Rowling.  In these sections of the episode, she is tracking down the story of her great grandfather, Louis Volant.

The first clip will demonstrate how official recordkeeping (just like the kind of official recordkeeping that may take place in an ece setting through documentation) helps tell the story of Louie’s war achievements.  The second looks more at the personal recordkeeping – so draws on family letters and photographs.  Both are rich forms of recordkeeping and both help tell the story of Louis in great detail and colour.

SLIDES 2 & 3 (YOUTUBE VIDEOS)






If the videos are unable to play for some reason – there is a summary taken from a television guide on a blog -  Monday, August 03, 2015 - http://blog.familytreemagazine.com/insider/CategoryView,category,WhoDoYouThinkYouAre.aspx – The Genealogy Insider – Diane Haddad
[This episode] took us on a European adventure through J.K. Rowling's maternal line. The author wanted to learn more about her mother’s roots in France and why her great-grandfather Louis Volant received the Legion d’Honnuer in World War I. 

Rowling visited stunning places, from the French national archives in Paris to the ancestral village of her second-great-grandmother on France's border with Germany. 
Her first stop included a treasure box of family history and helped to set the tone of the show: Sitting in her aunt’s home in Edinburgh, Scotland, Rowling gathered clues to Louis Volant's life. We learned that she shares Louis’s birth date, the same birth date she gave her much-beloved character Harry Potter. 
At the national archives, a bit of Rowling's world seemed to crumble as she realized the Louis Volant who received the Legion d’Honnuer wasn't her Louis. The birth date gave it away, along with a handwriting comparison. But further research revealed that Rowling's great-grandfather was nonetheless a hero who performed duties above and beyond what was expected as a member of France's 16th Territorial Infantry Regiment in World War I. 
The men in the Territorial Regiments were 35 to 40 years old and were charged with guarding roads and bridges, not fighting. Rowling discovered in military records how, in Courcelles-le-Compte in October 1914, Germans attacked Louis's unit during the “race to the sea.” Louis Volant received the Croix de Guerre for his actions during this battle. To many, this honor was even greater than the Legion d’Honnuer, an award only officers receive.



SLIDE 4




Recordkeeping provides “proof of personal, business and cultural activity; establishes personal and cultural identity; and functions as personal, corporate or collective memory”
There are many official definitions of records and recordkeeping, but I chose this one to highlight as I think it complements the YouTube videos we have just seen.  In the videos, JK Rowling was visibly moved by the records she was seeing.  She was also in many instances seeking evidence to answer questions – like who was her grandfather, what kind of military service did he do, why did he leave the family?  Often, in my work as a records professional, we get very caught up in the value of the business records.  This may be the case also for early childhood professionals.  But as these videos show – for JR Rowling, there was no distinction in the value of the different kinds of records, the personal records and stories they held, were equally as a valuable to her as the official military records.  Both types of records helped to paint a picture about the life of her grandfather.
Before I talk more about how recordkeeping theory and ideas might influence early childhood practitioners understanding of documentation, I will talk briefly about myself and my current research interests.

SLIDE 5





To introduce a little of myself, I am a Melbourne girl, born and bred and I live near the beachside suburb of Frankston in Victoria, Australia, pictured here.  I am the Records Manager at Monash University, where I am also a current PhD candidate.  I will talk a little about my PhD in the following slides.  I am also an enthusiastic yoga student and proud dog owner.
 As noted on the slide, in amongst all of this I have been an active early childhood researcher since 2011.  I have a Masters in Early Childhood Education from Monash, which included a thesis on children’s rights and television standards in Australia and I am now a quarter of the way into my PHD research, which is an interdisciplinary project, combining my interests in both early childhood education and recordkeeping.


SLIDE 6





In regards to my PhD topic - I am really interested in exploring family recordkeeping around the child.  So I am looking at how families create, manage, preserve and provide access to their child’s records in both hard copy and electronic formats.  So for example, if there was a family occasion, say a birthday, what records are captured to record this event? What form do these records take, why does the family choose to keep certain records of the event and discard others? How are these special mementos' of the event kept over time, who looks after them? What say does the child have in what is kept or not? How are they records accessed over time?  So some of the questions I am thinking about with this research includes -  does an understanding of recordkeeping help with family story telling, a child’s learning and their educational development? And also what role do such practices play in developing a sense of ‘the role that records play in our lives’ – especially the role records may play in determining identity, which is a key them in say the Early Years Learning Framework in Australia and related policy documents.


SLIDE 7




I always like to show this slide when discussing my research, and the story that goes with it.  As I think it encapsulates what family recordkeeping may mean, far better than anything I may be able to put down into words at this point.  This series of photographs was taken by a good friend of mine, Alina, who is also a professional photographer.  The images feature her son, Felix.   Alina took photos of Felix in the same chair, once a month over the course of his first year.  Over time, these images became a beautiful montage that Alina proudly showed on her Facebook timeline.  Yet, at the same time, these photos also form a tantalising record – documenting Felix’s growth, his developing personality, and all the ‘series of firsts’ that go along I imagine, in that first year of life.  This photo represents the type of family recordkeeping that Alina is managing around her child.  Another friend has painstakingly cuts squares of cloth from her son’s clothes from a young age – once he has of course, outgrown the clothes.  She keeps these pieces in a special place at home, and as quilt maker, her aim is to collect enough square pieces over his childhood to then compile the pieces into a quilt that should then be something he can hand over to his own children in time.  She sees the pieces of clothing as being a type of recordkeeping of her son’s childhood.   These examples demonstrate to me, the rich source of data provided in family recordkeeping and why I have chosen to research this.

SLIDE 8




But why do I think this research is important? It is anticipated that such an exploration of family recordkeeping will help to further expand on existing definitions of recordkeeping literacy.  Literacy is a common word within early childhood education literature, but what does it mean in the context of recordkeeping? There are related terms such as information literacy, and library literacy and things such as being ‘digitally literate’. But very little on recordkeeping literacy. But why is defining recordkeeping literacy important?
I feel that the issue of recordkeeping literacy is important because it is fundamentally about improving the awareness and understanding of what recordkeeping means.  For me, one of the biggest overlapping themes between recordkeeping and early childhood education, concerns identity.  Identity is a major learning outcome in the Australian Early Years Learning Framework, however there is no mention of recordkeeping and its relationship to identity in this document, or other similar types of policy documents.  Yet, even a brief look into the recordkeeping literature and also the early years literature, highlights how important an issue identity is in both disciplines.


SLIDE 9





Recordkeeping is a 'kind of witnessing'. On a personal level it is a way of evidencing and memorialising our lives - our existence, our activities and experiences, our relationships with others, our identity, our 'place' in the world. 
(McKemmish, 1996)
Narratives developed within families give children a sense of continuity, of belonging to a longer story which reaches back into the past.
(Swain & Musgrove, 2012)

SLIDE 10




Children learn about themselves and construct their own identity within the context of their families and communities. This includes their relationships with people, places and things and the actions and responses of others. Identity is not fixed. It is shaped by experiences. When children have positive experiences they develop an understanding of themselves as significant and respected, and feel a sense of belonging. Relationships are the foundations for the construction of identity – ‘who I am’, ‘how I belong’ and ‘what is my influence?’
(DEEWR, 2009)

So for me, there are strong connections between recordkeeping literacy and elements of early childhood education pedagogical outcomes in regards to the issue of identity and this is likely to form a key part of my PhD research.  Yet, in a related arm to this research, the literature review in particular, has also flagged that there are other types of recordkeeping activities already being undertaken in the early childhood education environment, which are often not identified as such.  And this brings me back to my earlier points around documentation.

As I mentioned at the start, early childhood documentation is a really fascinating form of recordkeeping.


SLIDE 11




One way that I have started to think about early childhood documentation through the lens of recordkeeping, is to look at some theoretical models from both the recordkeeping field and the early childhood education field.
The theoretical model, I am most familiar with, due to my background, is the records continuum model, and this is a model I will use in my PhD research.
The Records Continuum Model was developed by Monash University in the 1990s primarily by Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish, but many other scholars and practitioners have also helped to evolve the model and the thinking behind it over time.  The diagram on the left shows the basic nuts and bolts of continuum thinking, in that records are created and or captured, they are used and managed, then stored, then access is provided and that this works in a type of continuous loop – that things are always evolving and moving and interconnected.  This model on the left was produced as part of research into recordkeeping for children in care in Australia.  And when we look at that model, say against the ECE “Planning cycle” model on the right, which has come from the revised Victorian Early Years Learning framework, we can see some basic parallels.  The “Planning Cycle” model also identifies the different stages of document capture, use, management etc and that this is also a continuous never ending process.  That these different stages, feed into each other and influence each other. 



SLIDE 12




The following two models, represent  what I think is the broader context of recordkeeping and again features one model from the recordkeeping literature and another model (the adapted Bronfenbrenner ecological model) from the same Victorian Early Years Learning Framework.
If we start with the model on the right, the Victorian Early Years Learning Framework notes that this diagram “demonstrates how all children influence and are affected by the environments that surround them.  The ecological model that underpins the VEYLF framework acknowledges the life of each child within a social, environmental, political and economic context.”

The model on the right is an evolved continuum model, designed by Leisa Gibbons, a current academic working at Kent State University in the US.  Leisa completed her PhD at Monash recently.
In this model (and papers produced since), Gibbons provides a “comprehensive series of principles, concepts and theory that explores evidence, recordkeeping, multiplicity, plurality and memory making”.  As she notes “evidence cannot be conceptualised as a single one person narrative, but must be understood via multiple narratives” – which gives us a sense of what she means by multiplicity and “plurality refers to the multiple uses records and archives have beyond their management and organisation in official government or business recordkeeping systems”.  This concept of plurality linked to multiplicity helps to explore the big questions of why and what impact recordkeeping and archives have on the construction of society through memory systems. Memory can then be seen as a tool for individual and collective identity that be restructured only through the use, interpretation and reconstruction of information”. 

The model is interesting too as like with the ecological model, its central first circle is on the person (and in terms of documentation – we could maybe say this is where the child and teacher sit as potential co-creators of the documentation).  The mediated model that Gibbons promotes co creation as being necessary – as it highlights the need to be inclusive.  That all recordkeeping should enable “multiple and diverse voices to be heard across space and time”.  So in terms of ece documentation, the voices of children should also be heard, along with the teachers.  As documentation is often promoted in the literature as a reflective tool for both the teacher, child and even parents.  As the model moves into the wider circles, we see how recordkeeping of a personal nature, can then influence the wider community and also the collective memory.  I am still exploring this model in relation to family and ece recordkeeping, but I particularly like the mention of curating.  As when I have been inside early childhood settings, I have seen that curating is actually a big part of the ece documentation process.  As Gibbons notes, in regards to her model “curation is about exhibition and re-presentation of identify, content, communications, memory, participation and narrative within information spaces and plays a vital role in understanding these activities and their outcomes as evidence of their value”.  Gibbons has applied her model to explore the value of youtube videos as a form of recordkeeping, but I suspect my research will be able to explore this model in the context of both family and ece recordkeeping.

However, I didn’t just want to focus on theory today. I also wished to just lightly touch upon how a better understanding of recordkeeping may also assist teachers on the ground, dealing with documentation.  As the following slides show, there is perhaps sometimes a disconnect going on between the true meaning of documentation and then what is expected in terms of paperwork. I think the two are quiet distinct and I use the following slide to demonstrate this.

SLIDE 12




Anecdotal conversations that have come to me, via corridor conversations with teaching professionals, my PhD supervisor has introduced me to in passing, have revealed on a number of occasions, that teachers in Australia, can often feel overwhelmed by documentation requirements and that these practices don’t always contribute anything meaningful to their teaching experience or that of the children. This is of course, only anecdotal data at this stage, and not proven, but looking at the different emphasis’ made when discussing documentation practices, by Rinaldi and others as opposed to the National Quality Framework, there is an inkling as to why the act of documentation can sometimes get inadvertently buried under layers of bureaucracy and considered a burden.
I think a better understanding of documentation as a recordkeeping activity – may help ece professionals make a clearer distinction perhaps between what is true documentation, aimed at enriching the childs’ learning experiences and outcomes, as opposed to paperwork requirements tied up with assessment and other activities and dressed up by policy makers as part of documentation – when in fact it’s probably not part of the process of enriching the child’s experience, its actual just burdensome paperwork and should be identified as such.

SLIDE 13


LAST SLIDE TO BE ADDED

So to return to Who Do You Think You Are – I would encourage all ece professionals to watch some episodes – and to use the concepts in the show as a way of thinking about documentation in the ece setting.  As the show easily demonstrates how both personal and official recordkeeping can come together to tell good stories and how good recordkeeping also involves multiple voices. And demonstrates that one form of recordkeeping shouldn’t take higher precedent over the other.  The record continuum model that I introduced today – I think shows great potential for educators in terms of providing a means to understand the value of recordkeeping. It is hoped that by sharing and growing records literacy as a concept – this will lead to different ways of understanding ece learning concepts such as identity. Recordkeeping literacy may also have practical benefits for teachers in terms of helping to distinguish truly meaningful documentation activities as opposed to burdensome paperwork activities.