‘I can't read it; I don't know’: young children's participation in the pedagogical documentation of English early childhood education and care settings

Abstract This article discusses the findings about pedagogical documentation which were drawn from a study which the author co-directed in a range of English early childhood education and care settings and which focused on children's views of the early years curriculum. The article poses questions provoked by the study and uses the work of Rinaldi and Carr to interrogate the English context for documenting early learning. The article analyses documentation in theoretical terms such as deciding, decentralising, disciplining, didactic and dialogue and also considers accounts by practitioners and researchers of practical strategies. The argument is illustrated with a selection of the data from the original study by Garrick et al. and contends that the purpose of pedagogical documentation should be to enable adult and child communicative cooperation, rather than to provide statements about children's progress which feed into the ‘discourses of quality in early childhood’.