ChangeLab: a starting point
Co-designing recommendations for a trustworthy and fair approach to technologies in ECEC services
Cultivating a qualified ECEC system requires professionalism.
Professionalism can only be the result of reflection on practice and engagement in social and cultural transformation.
A ChangeLab promotes a critical, reflective approach to existing problems. It unfolds through several sessions of activities led by experts on a topic. An external expert, though, is not aware of a context of practice as the participants can be. Therefore, the expert only offers occasions for “mirroring” professional practices, to let the participants see themselves and their context, reviving situations and focusing on tensions and contradictions in their joint activity. Disentangling nodes and reflecting on possible/alternative futures, transformative solutions can arise.
The change lab set-up as it was conceived in 1996 (Engeström & Virkkunnen, 1996)
“Change Labs” are based on a methodology developed at the University of Helsinki, building on the socio-cultural theory of learning. Since their inception in 1996, they have been widely implemented in workplaces, including socio-sanitary and educational professions.
The primary aim of the "Change Lab" is the management of pedagogical documentation using technology in the ECEC service. Pedagogical documentation is complex: it can include educators' diaries or instruments adopted to analyse the childs' progress with regard to an educational project; or the progressof the overall project; or quality indicators. But it also encompasses documents produced to communicate with families about the educational activity and particularly the childs' development and achievements. In our prior research, we have identified problematic issues when adopting technologies for pedagogical documentation (Restiglian et al., 2023).
Therefore, we agree that this is a crucial area to effectively address the constantly evolving technological and digital challenges and to contribute to the proactive construction of an environment of professional growth, of dialogue with families and the territorial community, without ever losing sight of the centrality of the child. However, we also consider that problematic situations relating platforms, technologies misconceptions and usage by families, require professional intervention and policy making.
The ChangeLab, in the context of the Data Child Map aims to respond to the urgent need to explore and build a participatory perspective on “smart” technologies based on algorithms and huge amounts of user data. We have long insisted, in our project about the dilemmas imposed by the postdigital society.
How does pedagogical documentation, the core of a mature educational professionalism, evolve from the presence of technology so configured? And how can the educators intervene, to keep to the forefront the children's rights to quality education?
We have just started!
Three ECEC institutions (0-3) decided to take part in this joint adventure, and are now actively exploring problems and ideas around pedagogical documentation in a (post)digital era.