Documentation of pedagogical practise has become a vibrant issue through its relationship with educational policy- and government in many national contexts. Documentation is also regularly used as a tool for local, collegial development, not necessarily driven by the external demands for accounting educational outcomes. Against this background, the practise of documentation could be related to different modes of teacher professionalism; outside-in-professionalism, characterized by teachers as responding to external and standardized demands, and inside-out-professionalism characterized by teachers  as responding to complexity and change, through qualified judgment.   

Although documentation is regularly employed as a tool for local, collegial development, the responsibility for documentation commissioned by educational authorities remains an assignment, coming with consequences for how to relate this self-initiated local documentation to the demands of the educational authorities. The purpose of this presentation is to investigate the tension, between documentation based in inside-out-professionalism and outside-in-professionalism, by means of a case study from the Swedish preschool.  Our research questions reads: how do external demands of documentation impact on the collegial conditions of documenting practise? How do professional conditions of documenting impact on the external demands of documentation?

Our analytical point of departure proceeds from the assumption that documentation is shaped from certain positions, interests and perspectives (Vallberg Roth 2012), including the crossing between different interests and logics within educational institutions.  A qualitative case study of one preschool setting in which a long term documentation has been performed, using CoRe (pedagogical content representation) has been adapted as an approach for teaching science, in a practice based research collaboration project, will be related to intentions from the municipality. The gathering of data includes participant observations in preschool and interviews with participating preschool teachers, at municipal briefings, interviews with responsible parties representing the local preschool as educational agency, and by collection of documents. 

The expected outcomes of our study indicate that preschool teachers are acting between norms of designing documentation from their professional and local interests and that of adapting to the interests of the educational agencies. The first norm is based in their collegial self-defined needs (in collaboration with the researchers) for teaching science in preschool, mainly by teaching science and technology themes, paying attention to preschool children’s responses to science and technology content.  The second norm is characterised by accounting for national goals in the national syllabus, in ways corresponding with the national school system.  The preschool teachers respond to this latter assignment through (professional) deliberations, aiming to deliver material from their everyday work to the agency, while simultaneously keeping the integrity of their own work as separated from the assignment of the agency. These local deliberations and decisions will further be analysed in terms of the dynamic between the two modes of professionalism mentioned above, in light of the local policy context.      

Our project shed light on conditions shared with several European countries regarding possibilities for sustainable teacher development within broader contexts of demands for accountability impacting on teachers professional work.