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The Present Future: Child Assessment Tools as a Passage for Inscribing Ideas of Future into the Present

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Documentation in Institutional Contexts of Early Childhood

Abstract

In this chapter, we analyse how policies for enhanced documentation become a vibrant part of life in early childhood education and care. Pedagogues, parents, children and various artefacts act as co-creators of policies about child documentation. Exploring documentation as a socially constituted practice involving assessment, we argue that the documentation of child development enacts a passage through which ideas of the child in a future setting is inscribed into the present one. Rather than a mere overlay of schooling, we argue that a broader embracing of the child is at stake. The entanglement of antipathy towards schooling, yet invasion of cultural imaginaries of school, fosters a certain gaze at the child. It is a gaze in which the most dominant objective is the search for signs of the child’s enthusiasm and willingness to act as expected in the future context of school.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term, pedagogue refers to the Danish profession pædagog with a long history in Scandinavia. ‘Pædagog’ comprises workers within the area of daycare institutions (0–6 years) often translated into ‘kindergarten teacher’ or ‘pre-school teacher’ in English. But as Peter Moss (2006) points out: ‘Pedagogy’ is a long-established tradition in Continental Europe but virtually unknown in the English-language world, partly because it often gets lost in translation: the profession of ‘pedagogue’, for example, is often translated, incorrectly, as ‘teacher’ (Moss 2006, p. 32). In Denmark, a pedagogue undertakes a three-and-a-half year Bachelor’s Degree course at a college. Besides basic subjects, the pedagogue student specializes within one of three main areas: daycare, school and leisure time or social-and special care. The profession and practice of the pedagogue is not just limited to early childhood services. Their work can range over various groups and welfare institutions (e.g. daycare institutions 0–6 year) to after-school institutions and free time services to residential homes for young people and seniors).

  2. 2.

    The daycare institutions, children and staff in our research projects have been made anonymous. Each daycare institution is located in a different Danish municipality and our sample included institutions in both rural and urban areas. The pedagogical organizations and sizes of the six daycare institutions vary from around 35 children in the smallest institutions to 120 children in the largest. Beside ethnographic inspired fieldwork, participatory seminars with institution directors, pedagogues and parents have been conducted in two of the projects.

  3. 3.

    SPU: School readiness test (in Danish: skoleparathedsundersøgelse), developed by Lea Persson and John Quinn (1992). The SDU is an adaptation of the English ‘Bury Infant Check’ by the same authors. The Danish publishers refer to it as a test without any developed Danish norms for the adaption.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Maja Plum

  2. University College Absalon, Slagelse, Denmark

    Lene S. K. Schmidt

Authors
  1. Maja Plum
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  2. Lene S. K. Schmidt
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Correspondence to Maja Plum .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Maarit Alasuutari

  2. Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Helga Kelle

  3. Fachhochschule Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Helen Knauf

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Plum, M., Schmidt, L.S.K. (2020). The Present Future: Child Assessment Tools as a Passage for Inscribing Ideas of Future into the Present. In: Alasuutari, M., Kelle, H., Knauf, H. (eds) Documentation in Institutional Contexts of Early Childhood. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28193-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28193-9_4

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