Preservice Teachers’ Visions and Understandings of Classroom Documentation and Displays of Children’s Work in Elementary Schools

Abstract

At present, research exploring educator’s understandings of displays of student work is scant yet such displays are regularly exhibited within the community spaces of early learning and elementary schools. These displays communicate messages to those within the space about teacher and student agency, curricular priorities, children and their work, and the relationship between teaching and learning. Grounded in a framework of documentality and teacher vision, this paper explores the ways in which preservice teachers (PSTs) understand teacher-cultivated, student work documentation. This research used a Photo-Elicitation Interview methodology to develop a descriptive account of PSTs' visions and understandings of teacher-cultivated, classroom documentation and displays of children's work. Findings reveal that PSTs held paradoxical views of student work documentation teetering between an appreciation of an adult-centered aesthetic disconnected from their academic and creative capacities to an expressed valuing of an agentic positioning of children in the experiences of the classroom.