Uppföljning och utvärdering för förändring. Pedagogisk dokumentation som grund för kontinuerlig verksamhetsutveckling och systematiskt kvalitetsarbete i förskolan

Assessment and evaluation for change: Pedagogical documentation as foundation for continuous development of practice and systematic quality work in early childhood education

The purpose of the study is to examine, in relation to the curriculum for the Swedish preschool demands of assessment, evaluation and documentation what kind of knowledge that becomes possible through the use of pedagogical documentation, and how this knowledge answers to expectations of development of content, form and organisation of the early childhood educational context. Another purpose is to examine what a post-pragmatic perspective and an immanent idea of evaluation can imply for the two-folded task of the preschool: the societal reproduction of knowledge and the staging of possibilities for children’s own production of knowledge. Three theoretical perspectives have been used: curriculum theory, post-structural theory and an immanent philosophical perspective. Curriculum theory points out that it is essential to use and develop perspectives and methods of evaluation that relates to the goals of the preschool as tools for evaluation govern and shape both questions and analysis. The main study here is directed towards examining pedagogical documentation through an empirical study of one preschool’s use of pedagogical documentation during one year. When dealing with the empirical material my intention has been to make visible both kind of learning processes that this study interprets that the curriculum prescribes. Therefore one method used where curriculum theory and descriptions and categorisations as a part of a discursive analysis of how teachers use pedagogical documentation together with the children and in their planning-sessions. The second method consists of an immanent following up of the rhizomatic web of threads that appear and transform through the practice and where pedagogical documentation is part of the relational field of potentiality.