The study is theoretical and narrative—anchored in my own subjectivity and in
my experiences as a teacher working with young children in an urban elementary school
and in a new early childhood program. My participation in a year-long researcher-teacher
collaboration in the studio of a Reggio-inspired school for young children and my
observations in Reggio Emilia inform the processes through which I have generated data
through pedagogical documentation in each of these contexts. In Chapter One, I
interrogate images of children to illustrate how constructions of who children are (and
who they could become) produce and sustain educational institutions and relationships. It
is my intent to place the image of the rich, historical child in a relationship of positive
tension with the eternal child. In Chapter Two, I present pedagogical documentation as a
form of ethnographic research through which educators generate, test, and refine theories
as they co-construct knowledge with young children. Here, I trace how the small theories
that teachers develop through practice can contribute richness and complexity to the
larger body of theory in educational research. In Chapter Three, I situate children’s
visual productions as cognitive and socio-cultural processes that are socially distributed
to investigate how children make meanings through making as individual and group
learners. I consider children’s making in various media and use theory from
contemporary literacy educators to support a construction of children’s visual productions
as making in visual languages. I assert that in their making, children strive for
communicative fluency. In Chapter Four, I contribute to current theories of child art in
early childhood education by positioning children’s visual productions as making—a
iv
social practice that performs social work in multiple social worlds—and by extending the
theoretical assumptions about children’s making to include ways in which children make
with new media. In the Epilogue, I review the theoretical contributions that I make in the
study. Those include the idea of unacceptable children, the portability of the Reggio
Emilia approach and site-specific pedagogy, the idea of making, and the process of
finding voice in research and writing.