ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the many different uses of documentation, focusing on its principal purpose – planning for the next stages in children's learning on a daily basis. Documentation in the infant-toddler centres begins with building an understanding of how parents view their children. Documentation is a dialogue of the children's learning and our own development and knowledge. Documentation underpins the whole approach to understanding young children's learning in the preschools and infant-toddler centres of Reggio Emilia. Documentation involves both observation and interpretation – educators in Reggio speak of a web of reciprocal interpretation or a spiral of documentation. The documentation clearly demonstrated the early stages of group learning and understanding. Documentation helped the children to retain, and remember, the thread running through their learning and to investigate different ways of communicating their ideas to others. The documentation panels are created in the Centre for Documentation and Research under the supervision of a member of the pedagogical team.
