Documentation Strategies: Pedagogical Documentation from the Perspective of Early Childhood Teachers in New Zealand and Germany

This a secondary publication from 2023 of an original article published in 2020. Pedagogical documentation is practised in early childhood centres all over the world as a means to gauge the learning and development of children. From the point of view of teachers, however, documentation must compete with numerous other tasks. This paper explores the strategies teachers employ in order to integrate documentation into their working day. It takes a comparative approach, analysing documentation strategies in two countries. Accordingly, qualitative interviews were conducted with 24 teachers from early childhood centres in Germany and New Zealand, in which they were asked about their documentation practices. The results show that the teachers have developed strategies primarily in order to gain time for documentation and to structure it in such a way that they can deal with the extra burdens it creates. The results highlight the profound influence of organisational framework conditions on the content of work in early childhood centres.