Earlier this Spring, our team facilitated a new version of Family Creative Learning (FCL) in collaboration with the ideaLAB at the Hadley Branch Library. This post takes a closer look at how we approached documentation during this workshop series.
Why We Document
We are particularly inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to documentation. The Reggio Emilia approach uses documentation to “make learning visible” – to learners, families, and educators and views documentation as a tool to foster deeper learning and to reflect on the design of learning experiences. Using photos, project artifacts, notes captured by educators, and other forms of media, documentation can highlight the process of learning, such as how children develop questions, playfully try out ideas, work together, and improvise with materials — key learning experiences that can often be overlooked when we just focus on the outcomes. (Want to know more? We like this resource from Project Zero that discusses Reggio Emilia style documentation as a tool for learning.)
In the past, our team engaged in documentation for research purposes only. But we noticed that we were learning a lot through capturing and analyzing documentation and we wondered, “why don’t we engage facilitators and families and make sense of our experiences together with documentation?” Starting in 2017, instead of keeping the documentation to ourselves and reviewing it at the completion of an FCL workshop series, we started to curate it with facilitators between workshops. We also began to engage families in the documentation as a part of the workshop experience. We found that families appreciated this approach, and it fostered conversations about their experiences during the workshops. Some families shared that they felt seen and recognized through the documentation.
What We Tried
Over the years, our facilitation team has tried several different ways of sharing back documentation with families during workshops. We have a new paper coming out in Interaction Design and Children this summer that discusses our design iterations. Here’s the link to the pictorial: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3501712.3534093 While we loved the aesthetics and collaborative nature of some of these past approaches, it was often a heavy lift for the facilitation team and sometimes required specialized materials or tools such as vinyl cutters. We wanted to pilot an approach that might be easier for other practitioners to take up in this implementation.
In this most recent approach, each week* every family received an 11”x17” color printout that highlighted a few key moments that facilitators noticed. The printouts featured photos and quotes from family members captured by the facilitation team and the team’s reflections on how the family was learning and working together. Here’s an example of one family’s documentation page from week 1:
The image above shows a family documentation print-out from week 1. Typically the print-outs feature the family’s names at the top of the page. We removed their names in this image in accordance with our media guidelines for sharing family images.
*For readers that aren’t familiar with FCL: typically FCL workshops are a couple of hours long and meet once per week for four to six weeks.
Here's what our workflow each week looked like:
1. Capturing the documentation
Facilitators captured photos with their phones. Everyone wrote field notes in their notebooks during the workshop and after the workshop, they created a virtual version of their field notes in google docs. One person acted as the lead documenter and had a dedicated digital camera (this was my role during this workshop series).
2. Assembling the family documentation pages
I prepared a template in Google Slides immediately following the workshop. Each family had a page and I seeded each page with some suggested photos, quotes, or reflections. I invited facilitators to add their documentation to the slides during the week. Occasionally, I pulled in quotes or reflections from facilitators’ written field notes. At the end of the week, I finalized a draft of each family’s page and asked our facilitation team to review the drafts. Finally, I printed the pages and brought them with me to the next workshop.
The image above shows an example of a Google Slides documentation template. We treated the four squares as suggestions and adjusted the layout as needed, e.g., some pages might have 3-4 photos and only one facilitator observation.
3. Sharing the family documentation pages
Families received their documentation pages towards the beginning of each workshop. In this workshop series, there wasn’t much time built in to have a focused discussion around the documentation, but we noticed that families appreciated the printouts. Kids were eager to take their photos home, and family members mentioned feeling seen by some of the observations. We also tried a new activity in the final week of the workshop. We provided photos to cut out and reflection prompts to respond to and asked families to create a page that told a story about their experiences in the workshop.
We plan to have more conversations with families about the documentation during post-workshop interviews. In one interview, a mother shared that seeing the documentation motivated her to come back. Seeing the photos and notes together made her feel like her family was doing something important.
Takeaways and lessons learned:
One strength of this approach was that the format made it easy for us to collaborate as a team in Google Slides to prepare the documentation. Additionally, keeping the documentation in a standard, easy-to-print format (a tabloid-sized page) eliminated the need to use specialized software or paper cutting tools. Something we missed in this implementation that we tried in previous implementations was a collaborative display of documentation. Families took home their documentation pages each week and didn’t have as many opportunities to look at documentation from other families. In the future, I’d like to explore how we can create meaningful and thoughtful collaborative displays of workshop documentation using simple tools like Google Slides and printouts.
Here are a couple of additional tips I took away from this workshop series:
Be flexible in your documentation plan to make space for emergent moments – like when our team noticed a lot of moments where different families collaborated and supported each other and we decided to make a new printout that highlighted these interactions.
The role of “documenter” is a lot of work! As a documenter, I spent most of the workshop time capturing photos and videos. It would’ve been difficult for me to simultaneously take on a lead facilitation role and a lead documentation role. It also takes a significant amount of time (at least 2-4 hours) between workshops to go through photos, edit them if needed, curate and collect other pieces of documentation, and assemble the final printouts.