Heads up: This post is 14 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
The Diary of Laura is a small book published by the municipality of Reggio Emilia in 1983 that represents a milestone in the experiences of Reggio Emilia educators and stated many principles of their educational philosophy. I’ve just finished reading “The Diary of Laura – Perspectives on a Reggio Emilia Diary” and I would like to share some of the key points (to me) of the significance of a Diary or Documentation in Reggio Emilia. Almost everything below is excerpt from the first 2 chapters of the book, the actual diary is for you to discover yourself if you find the excerpts intriguing.
Educators connect with Laura’s diary in a powerful way, no matter what age group they teach, and it suggests new ways to use pedagogical documentation in early childhood programs, teacher education and to promote a family-centered, relationship-based approach to services for very young children and their families.
The diaries were used by the teachers to plan and motivate activities, to make explicit the “whys,” the reasons behind choices, the real or presumed motivations, and particularly the precise description of events.
The diary is a documentation that can offer detailed descriptions, rich with diversity of visual and photographic images, as a testimony of the epistemological event pertaining to the child as well as the teacher.
Highlights of description and commentary of microepisodes, or microstories, that give continuity to individual experiences. Laura’s diary used microstories to connect the relationships between the individual story of each child, and the story of the peer group. The peer group gives context to the individual stories, and vice versa.
Children are rarely captured isolated, the teachers’ efforts to not document the child in isolation but to consider the context surrounding the child gives rise to a contextual documentation, describing the “where” and the “how”, and also hypothesizing the “why”.
Documentation is useful to educators as practice in observation. The diaries are “ecological”, open to the constant change of conditions and to capturing situations in their richness and complexity. A precious element is the teachers’ subjective reactions to the events and lived experiences, they are passionate and engaged participants of the context, rich in emotions. The reflectiveness necessary when writing and reading (individually or in groups) is what transforms the stories into knowledge.
The diary becomes the key to a progressive curriculum development and to better planning of new spaces and activities. The environments change on the basis of those annotations, and the stories become evidence of the child and the group’s learning process.
The writing strives to capture not so much the child but the event that takes place between the child and the educator, the child and the children, the objects and spaces. Those notes are not all on the child, nor the adult, but on the dynamics that arise in their relationships. The appropriately timed use of photos and sketches with the notes are together aimed to record the significance in the captured situation. The diary is only compiled when events are considered to have new significance, when it arouses surprise in its characters and is likely to increase knowledge.
Image of a child – a child who knows and is able to do, who knows and is able to discover, suggest, involve, whenever the adult is also able to listen, see, suggest, relaunch, provoke, wonder, make hypothesis, and relate, and whenever an adult is able to document and fix in time the child’s own curiosity, hypothesis and questions, creating projects and contextualizing hypothesis and possible answers.
The current focus of the diary at Reggio Emilia’s infant-toddler center is both a child with whom it is possible to dare, because he wants to dare, as well as a child we can read in his relationships with materials, the environment, with us, with peers, a child who daily constructs his knowledge through the many languages that we are learning to value.
Laura gave us testimony of how each child possesses relational associations, knowledge, and research strategies of his or her own, strategies that are supported and valued by the environment, environment as network of relationships as well as structural environment.
If you like what you’ve seen here so far, do check out “The Diary of Laura – Perspectives on a Reggio Emilia Diary”. As a practitioner of the Reggio Emilia Approach, you’ll get a lot of push back from traditional academia. I think rereading this book and your own diaries of your children will help renew your spirit, knowing that you are on a totally different level of relationship with your children! (I certainly needed it today as I butted head with my mom about Lucien’s education!) :(
- Nick