Tertiary education as a context for creating documentors

Trying to learn to do pedagogical documentation as an assessment task creates particular tensions for student teachers. Being a teacher educator trying to share the potential of working with this tool is also complex. This chapter shares the thinking of Joanne, Daniella, and Pamela, three new graduates, and two of the staff, Alma and Catherine, from an Australian early childhood teacher education program. In this specialist, four-year Bachelor of Education degree, pedagogical documentation is introduced in the third year professional experience program and developed further in the fourth year. A process that is fundamentally philosophical and pedagogical has become a component of assessment, constrained by the timelines and artificiality of the practicum situation. The power of this way of working, however, has such potential for generating insight and scaffolding teaching that we have persevered. This material was developed originally as a symposium presentation (Burr, Crisafulli, Fleet, Patterson and Silversides, 2001). Several years later, each of the original graduates reflected on more recent perspectives of their documenting journeys.