In the Swedish pre-school, documentation of children’s activity is mandated in the national syllabus, Lpfö -98 (Skolverket, 2010). There are different documentations, both concerning material, e.g. photos, drawings, videos and for different purposes. One kind of documentation which is prominent for different kinds of actors in the pre-school, is the documentation panels of children’s activities posted on the walls (Helm, Beneke & Steinheimer1998; Kline 2008). Such “publications” can be seen as a case for how the pedagogues are interpreting the task of documenting the activity of the children in relation to their educational goals. However, documentation of children is always a social construction, focusing on certain things while excluding (possible) others. The documentation is not only a presentation of what is going on in the daily practice of the pre-school, but a discursive practice in which children are being constructed in different ways (Lenz Taguchi 2010). Our purpose is to explore how constructions of the child are performed in documentation panels in Swedish pre-schools.  The theoretical framework is taken from post-structural theory and from visual methodology (Rose 2007). The material consists of photographs from documentations from which a selection of documentations has been made. Some preliminary categories are discerned and will be presented in our paper. 

Our preliminary findings show that the child is constructed mostly (but not only) in relation to educational goals which are attached to photographs with an accompanying text, constructing the child as e.g. someone who is learning and as someone being socialized as a “good pal”. The documentation panels focus mainly on good examples, i.e. of successful development and with a claim of capturing such a process in the public documentations. Our project is exploring both the local preconditions as well as the local consequences of the increasing accountability in the pre-school sector, and can be regarded as relevant for educational research in Scandinavia.