Pedagogisk dokumentation – en pseudoverksamhet? : Lärares arbete med dokumentation i relation till barns delaktighet

Sammanfattning: The aim of the study is to contribute knowledge about pedagogical documentation in relation to children’s participation. The focus is directed both towards teachers’ actions in connection with documentation production during project work and towards teachers’ descriptions of their intention with thedocumentation situation. In the study, Habermas’ Communicative Action Theory has been used to analyze teachers’ actions in initial work with pedagogical documentation. The empirics consist of video observations of project work as well as interviews with teachers acting in the filmed material. The concepts from communicative action theory that have been primarily used in the analysis comprise communicative and strategic action as well as system and life-world. The analysis shows the occurrence of child participation in the studied contexts but also its tendency to decrease in connection with the production of documentation. The primary reason for this seems to be teachers’ intention that the documentations should visualize certain parts of the activity, which in the study can be referred to natural science contents. In parallel, the teachers’ intention is also to highlight the importance of what children show an interest in among the activities conducted. When children fail to show an interest in that which the teachers wish to visualize through documentation, the children are geared, by subtle or more tangible methods, towards the contents that agree with the teachers’ visualization intentions. However, the documentations are presented as being based on the interests, curiosity and proved commitment of the children. The documentations consequently signal that, according to the teachers, they are supposed to reflect the interests shown by the children while, simultaneously, the analysis shows that the actions taking place in connection with the documentation are mainly of a strategic nature. The result demonstrates that teachers tend to act strategically in documentation situations, whereas communicative actions predominate in the 2 situations analyzed that do not comprise documentation work. One conclusion drawn is that the actual documentation conduces to diminishing children’s participation, which in turn seems to be due to the perception by teachers that the documentation should be directed towards specific activity contents. The initial work with pedagogical documentation hence contributes to visualizing a manufactured picture of children’s participation while, simultaneously, real participation takes place within the project work without being subject to documentation.