The thesis takes an agential reading of documentation practices to trace the intra-activity within contemporary assessment discourses of early childhood education (ECE) and offers a material-discursive exploration of three teachers at work in one school in North West England.
The research aims to reflect on the performativity of documentation to illuminate how assessment discourses are game-played and challenged. I put to work the methodological framework of new materialism through embodied, sensory and visual data collection, with on-line blogging along with intraviews. Using a diffractive analysis, I playfully map and cut visual, narrative and theoretical data fragments to create research documentation that traces the intra-activity of the human world of children, families and teachers with the non-human spaces and temporalities of the classroom.
The findings uncover resisting and creating intra-actions that generates spaces for teachers to adopt expert gameplay with and against assessment policy discourses. For children and families, the documentation intra-acts with spaces and temporalities to evoke senses of belonging by giving value to children’s playful learning.
In summary, this study presents both theoretical and practice implications. Theoretically, a reworked definition through new materialist lenses is proposed as a contribution to knowledge that asserts documentation practice as a potential transformative agent that can shift the teacher gaze. Practically, the thesis proposes that documentation can have powerful affects when its actions within spaces (rather than interpretations) are foregrounded. In addition, I problematise how far new materialist readings can find a practical language that speaks to teachers working within contested spaces shaped by intensifying policyscapes.
As a consequence, the thesis proposes that documentation can influence forms of ethical pedagogies that paint hopeful pictures of ECE teachers at work, promoting liveable and flourishing professional spaces in a policy climate that can otherwise confine
