Introduction

Recording and documenting are two distinct ways of relating to what happens on a daily basis in early childhood education. Daily register recognizes the traces of actions and the echoes of speech as signs that enable the teacher to plan new encounters and new discoveries in the company of babies and children. The material support of the record belongs to the person who produces it and is inscribed in the private sphere of the teaching experience. Pedagogical documentation has a different purpose: It aims to show what happened in the nursery school and pre-school from and beyond the personal and immediate experience of the subjects involved. By giving visibility to the daily life of the school, the documentation brings to the public light the gestures and speeches of the protagonists of the educational scene. As it enables a dialog with all those involved in the education of newcomers in the world, pedagogical documentation can be considered a democratic practice that involves collective decision, political commitment, and participation of the school community (^{Moss, 2009}).

In addition to giving visibility and making public what happens in early childhood schools, documentation raises the ethical question of what and how we configure, through writing, the visible and audible things that take place between us, as teachers, and the children with whom we live daily in our teaching practice. If the daily record is an instrument of pedagogical practice, as will be presented later (^{Ostetto, 2012}), pedagogical documentation can be considered as an instrument of early childhood education centers to pose the philosophical question about what we want for our children here, now and in the future (^{Dahlberg; Moss, 1999}).

In this article, I intend to show how the record can be transfigured into pedagogical documentation. First, I will try to point out the similarities of the record with the chronicle, since we also produce a brief report in permanent relationship with time. Next, I will try to point out the dramatic character of the educational scene that is produced by the registration and documentation of what happens daily in the early childhood schools. Finally, I will present three scenes that dramatize the pedagogical practice and the protagonism of babies and children in the educational scene.

The chronicle and the register

The chronicle is the genre that comes closest to what we teachers do when we record what happens at school. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is a certain similarity between the daily record, what we write after remembering what happened at school, and the chronicle. For ^{Antonio Candido (2003, p. 89)}, the chronicle is a minor genre, because “[…] it speaks closely to our most natural way of being”. It rejects all discursive pomp and takes what happens in everyday life as its theme. Like the daily record of the teacher in the early childhood schools, the chronicle brings together themes scattered among themselves, combined in an apparently loose composition, but which, for this very reason, fits so well with everyday sensibility (^{Candido, 2003}).

Although there is a fundamental difference between the daily register and the chronicle – since the latter is the daughter of the feuilleton and therefore born to be read in the public light of the world and the former is a private document that serves only to note some landscapes of an itinerary still in progress – none of them claim to give the last word on a specific theme or to reveal the truth hidden behind the veil that covers the reality of human affairs. The themes that were collected on the first floor or on the shop floor of the school dispense any and all expedients of rhetorical grandiloquence and grammatical refinement (^{Candido, 2003}).

With this unpretentious gesture, the chronicler humanizes language, as he seeks orality in writing (^{Candido, 2003}). This humanization allows, according to ^{Candido (2003)}, the recovery of the depth contained in the apparently trivial themes that spring spontaneously from everyday life. The daily record also seeks to humanize pedagogical practice, giving depth to what is lived in the daily life of the school. It shares with the chronicle the same unpretentious gesture. The record does not propose to explain theoretically what happened on the shop floor of the school nor to apply a theory that can account for the experience lived by the teacher in their task of educating and caring for the youngest. It simply reports fragments of everyday life and teaching experience.

The word that names this minor genre is of Greek origin. As ^{Davi Arrigucci (1987)} rightly observed, a contemporary reader may not realize that the word chronicle is related to the word χρόνος (khrónos), which fundamentally, means time. The word khrónos is usually associated with a technical object and a specific way of measuring time, i.e., the mechanical clock and chronological time, which were obviously foreign to Greek speakers. The clepsydra or water clock could measure the passage of time at regular intervals, but not as homogeneous and identical intervals. Khrónos has to do with time, with duration and the passage of time; it also concerns a specific time and a precise moment, including, in its semantic field, the time and ages of life (^{Bailly, 1901}). According to ^{Arrigucci (1987, p. 51)}, the original link between chronicle and khrónos points to “[…] a form of time and memory, a means of temporal representation of past events, a record of life drained away”. The modern chronicler and the ancient historian, by basing their practices of remembering and writing on the same original bond with khrónos, produce an account in permanent relation with time. When we register what happened to us and to the children in the early childhood school, we also produce an account in permanent relationship with time.

It is important, for our purpose, to point out the degree of kinship, indicated by Davi ^{Arrigucci (1987)}, between the chronicler and the historian. In the beginning, says ^{Arrigucci (1987)}, history was not a science, like astronomy, but a historical chronicle, a narration of historical facts according to the order of time, which is not the same between ancient and modern historians. “In this historical sense, the chronicler is a narrator. As Benjamin noted, the historian writes down the facts, seeking an explanation for them, while the chronicler, who preceded him, limited himself to narrating them […]” (^{Arrigucci, 1987, p. p. 52}). The chronicler, like the popular narrator, says ^{Arrigucci (1987)}, was an artisan of experience who transfigured the raw material of what was lived into narration; he was a master in the art of storytelling, in composing narratives and weaving plots. On the other hand, according to ^{Arrigucci (1987)}, the modern chronicler is crossed by another temporality, another mode of production, which submits him to consumption and to the concerns of an always unfulfilled desire, to the vertiginous rhythm of the metropolis and to the fleetingness of everyday life.

To make it possible to narrate daily events that happen at school, it is necessary to slow down time, suspend the chronological time of the mechanical clock, and invent another temporality regime in which it would be possible to exchange experiences. Narration allows us to scale time in longer intervals. The storyteller can dwell on details and describe thoroughly a scene that lasted only a few seconds. By narrating my early childhood school experience in this way, I can understand better what happened between me and the children. With this strategy, the narrative creates dams to contain the flow of time and memory, making it possible to give depth to everyday events. Narrating what we experience in everyday school life allows us to distance ourselves from our ordinary tasks, and it broadens our temporal experience. But for that we need to see and hear more slowly. “Acceleration causes the absence of meaning in what is done daily in life at school, because, paradoxically, it offers a feeling of many tasks accomplished, but of failure in the sense of teaching achievements […]” (^{Barbosa, 2013, p. 271}). By narrating what we do and what we suffer when we assume responsibility for the care and education of the youngest, we scale time in a heterogeneous and non-linear way.

According to ^{Denizart Fazio (2023)}, a narrative is a form of artisanal communication. Like a pot that is impregnated with the fingerprints of the potter who produced it, the narrative bears the marks of the narrator’s experience. It allows the transmission of what is unique in the exercise of the craft of teaching, of what could not be transmitted through reports full of information about children. In this sense, the narrative is the opposite of news and information, because those who want to stay informed have no time to waste (^{Larossa, 2002}).

By remembering and transmitting our experience, we give time to certain past events at the expanse of others, and we share it with others. Remembering what we have experienced and allowing time to remembering and writing are two attitudes that give depth to the teaching experience. Those who give time do not lose it, but gain it, as teaches the Catalan philosopher ^{Josep Esquirol (2009)}. “Giving time is the exception to the passage of time. Life does not diminish, on the contrary, it increases, it grows by giving [time]. We do not lose time or let it pass when we give time” (^{Esquirol, 2009, p.92}). The daily record is, for those who teach in Early Childhood Education, a way of giving time, a way of suspending the fleeting passage of time.

Drama and the educational scene

Like the chronicle, the daily register has a permanent relationship with time. Those who register what happened in the early childhood education produces a brief account that bears the subjective imprint of the person who made it. Recording everyday life allows the experience lived by us and the children to appear to other people. When the record manages to give visibility and movement to what happened in front us, we weave a plot that describes the visible and the audible for other people who, as spectators, can see and hear the drama of everyday life at school. It is as if we were part of a spectacle and, in this sense, the record maintains a close relationship with theater. When it produces a fragment of everyday school life, the record is nothing else than the construction of an educational scene that took place in the school. With this gesture of narrating what happens at school, we inscribe ourselves in the educational scene and thus appear, at the same time, as author and character of a drama.

From a theatrical point of view, drama is what happens on stage between the persona dramatis and between the characters of the play who interact with each other. In early childhood school, every relationship that occurs between us, teachers, and the children can be seen as an educational scene. The record becomes a dramatic genre, because in it we put on stage the actions and speeches that occurred during a specific moment of our working day. However, not everything that happened to us and to the children in the daily life of school affects us equally. What makes our record more or less dramatic is the way things that happen at school affect us. The dramatic character of the record has to do with our human capacity to affect and be affected by the things that happen around us. From the record, we can circulate these affections beyond our personal experience.

If we want to support this relationship between dramaturgy and pedagogy, we must note that in the daily record, unlike the theatrical experience, the construction of the scene comes after the action of the characters and not before! In the production of an educational scene, we represent the representation of the children, their ways of playing and fantasizing, their dialogues and actions, their questions, and hypotheses. It is therefore an expedient that seeks to distance itself from everyday events and playful fabrications, in order to better portray them through the composition of a narrative. For the American critic and playwright ^{Eric Bentley (1981, p. 170)}, since life is action, playing and acting are the same thing for children, but for us adults, “[…] it is difficult to say, when observing three-year-old children, at what point play ends and acting begins”.

It is the role of children in early childhood school to take the lead in education. They play this role extraordinarily well when they are not subjected to the exercise of adult-centrism. This protagonism is never reduced to the participation of older children in conversation circles and collective decisions. It can happen in all moments of daily life, even in moments when the action of caring and educating seems to be carried out only by the adult, such as when changing a baby’s diaper. However, in order for us to perceive the protagonism of a baby at the moment of changing his diapers, it is necessary to recognize in the drama of the educational scene the baby’s ability to act an interact. “Drama requires the eyes of the spectator” (^{Bentley, 1981, p. 20}). Dramatizing the educational scene requires us to recognize its conflictive elements, which constitute human action. To recognize the drama of the educational scene, it is necessary to detach it from the opaque background that makes the ordinary events of everyday school life homogeneous. In the record, we lend our gaze to give visibility to want happened before our eyes in the early childhood school and to enable different arrangements to continue the drama of the educational scene.

For ^{Bentley (1981)}, recognizing the importance of the small rituals that occur daily, from the very beginning of our lives, is fundamental to theatrical representation. Hygiene and feeding practices are examples of these small rituals that are repeated every day in a child’s life. In early childhood school, it is equally fundamental to recognize the relevance of these small rituals in order to observe babies and children in their daily actions. Everything that happens in the daily life of the early childhood school, if observed carefully and without prejudice, can be seen not as a routine that repeats itself in a linear and homogeneous time, but as a repetition that makes these small rituals of the beginning of our lives possible. “Repetition is also a dominant feature of our pleasures. To learn a little dance is to learn a little figure repeated ad libitum” (^{Bentley, 1981, p. 169}). To look at children’s experience as something that is repeated each time in a unique way is to recognize that everyday life in the early childhood school matters; it is to recognize the practices of caring and playing as small rituals that are only inscribed in the order of the rite because they are constantly repeated.

Could we read, in this sense, the daily register of ^{Madalena Freire (1999)}, in A paixão de conhecer o mundo, as a chronicle of pedagogical practice that dramatizes the events and small rituals that occur daily in the early childhood school? There is no doubt that the records form a narrative composition that has a permanent relationship with time and drama. By inventing a temporal and dramatic relationship between theory and practice, an intermediate region is created in which concepts can play against the narration of everyday life and school experience. We find, side by side, in Madalena Freire’s narrative composition, some fundamental concepts of Jean Piaget’s and Paulo Freire’s theories, some descriptions and considerations regarding the formation of the group and playing in the park, the participation of families and the organization of space, the role of the teacher, and the passionate transmissions of knowing the world. It is as if Madalena’s language spoke closely to our most natural way of being, as if her writing and sensibility affected our way of being a teacher in the early childhood school. Because of their beauty and simplicity, Madalena’s stories can be considered as a model of pedagogical documentation that still moves us today and makes us think about what we are doing and suffering when we assume our responsibility for the education and care of babies and children in the early childhood school.

The transfiguration of the register and the emergence of pedagogical documentation

Living together, remembering, and writing down are the three times of the daily record. Events that the teacher of the early childhood school can register are born from everyday life. The traces we leave in our daily interaction with children, their words and actions, their demands and desires are signs that allow us to both remember and imagine our position in the educational scene. By writing down these signs on a material support, we build the memory of our pedagogical practice.

According to ^{Luciana Ostetto (2012)}, the record is an instrument that supports and articulates the relationship between theory and practice, assists, organizes, and guides the teaching action. But what does it mean to think of registration as an instrument of our pedagogical practice? Since the 18th century, with the development of tools and instruments, according to ^{Gilbert Simondon (2020)}, it is customary to understand a tool as a technical object that allows one to extend and prepare the body to perform a gesture; and an instrument as a technical object that allows one to extend and adapt the body to obtain a better perception (^{Simondon, 2020}). The daily record, as a tool of perception, allows us to prepare our body for the creation of new gestures, for the release of movements not yet perceived; it makes it possible to extend our gaze and our listing beyond the fleeting moment of the teaching action that often evanesce in the flow of events that happen daily in the early childhood school.

Despite the approximation between the record and the technical object, ^{Luciana Ostetto (2012, p. 25)} states that “[…] recording is not a technique: it is life! And each must take responsibility for their designs and for their projects. Launching oneself forward. To see oneself and to review oneself. Recording is, above all, a reflexive action, an action that seeks to inscribe the teacher as a playwright of the educational scene whose protagonism is that of the children. When I record, I tell myself what happened. I write down on a material support certain signs that allow me to reconstruct what happened between me and the children. The transfiguration of the record into pedagogical documentation is an ethical-political attitude, which involves the decision to deprivatize what was lived, the decision to make visible and public what, if it were not for this gesture of bringing to the public light of the world, could never be shared with the others. Documentation arises from this attitude that expropriates the lived, which makes common what only the subject of the experience can transmit through language.

Composing, editing, and publishing are the three times of pedagogical documentation. The pedagogical documentation is born from the tangle of notes and fragments of everyday life that teachers weave for themselves. By making visible and public what we are doing and what we are suffering in the daily life of the early childhood school, we appear to ourselves as another. We interpret our pedagogical practice and construct not only subjectively, but also socially, our position on the educational scene. We are exposed by our conceptions and our principles of action, our words and attitudes, our practices, and our speeches. With pedagogical documentation, we make connections with a community of teachers who share the task of educating and caring for newcomers into our common world.

According to Gunilla ^{Dahlberg and Peter Moss (1999)}, when we document our pedagogical practice, we build a relationship between ourselves, as teachers, and the children whose thinking, saying, and acting are documented. This gesture of documenting is, therefore, an ethical-political attitude, a choice that implies who documents to what is publicly exposed by the documentation. By deprivatizing the teaching experience and giving visibility to what we think, say, and how we act, documentation can contribute to a deepened self-reflexivity, in other words, it can help us to better understand and feel how we become teachers in the early childhood school, how we constitute ourselves as teachers in the daily life with babies and children in early childhood education (^{Dahlberg; Moss, 1999}).

Documenting everyday school life: three educational scenes

In the following, I share three educational scenes that I was able to experieIn the following part, I share three educational scenes that I was able to experience and built as a teacher, in three Early Childhood Education Centers (ECEC) of the public system of Vinhedo, in the interior of São Paulo, and at different times of my sixteen years of working experience with babies and children. These reports have already been read by the Pedagogical Coordinators of each ECEC, but had never been published beyond the institutional scope. Therefore, it is a matter of transfiguring the record into documentation; of deprivatizing or deinstitutionalizing the report about what happened in my teaching experience with babies and children. As there is no image exposure, nor identification of the Early Childhood Education Centers, I kept the names of the babies and children, in order to avoid the anonymity of the protagonists and preserve the authorship of their actions and speeches (^{Kramer, 2002}).

It is worth recalling that the documentation of the educational scene, insofar as documenting is a process of visualization, does not represent the true reality (^{Dahlberg; Moss, 1999}). The plots of each of the narratives that follow were produced in interpretative acts, that is, they could be woven in other ways and configured from other perspectives. With this brief observation, I want to insist on the fact that those who document are implicated in the documentation. It is from a singular point of view that each report was produced in order to give visibility not only to what happened at school, but to what happened to me at school. The production of pedagogical documentation presupposes a personal gesture that configures a style and a way of looking. If documenting means making visible and audible what happened between us, teachers, and the children in the daily life of the early childhood school, the documentation is built by a series of choices, decisions of what and how to tell. This is precisely why documentation is selective, partial, and contextual (^{Dahlberg; Moss, 1999}).

Cylinders for what I want you

I arrive at the entrance to the room with my hands full. The door is open halfway up and, with a small latch on in inside, closed halfway down. Before entering, I am greeted by Rebeca’s expressive eyes and a loud cry from Lucas. Some babies do not notice my presence since I sat for a few seconds outside. Before entering, I remove my shoes with my feet and leave them on the doorstep. I slowly open the door and place the box on the floor covered with colored Ethylene-vinyl Acetate (E.V.A.). This time, I did not have to turn off the television. The previous teacher had already turned it off before leaving the room. I turn on my speaker and connect it to my cell phone, which today was playing the album Mara by the German instrumental band Fazer. I move a tire, that is part of the furniture, to the center of the room and place some cardboard pipes supported on the tire, which was covered with a flowery fabric with a white background. Around the tire, I randomly distribute the “noodle” buoys. Before I finished organizing the materials as I had mentally planned, the bamboos were already in the hands of some babies. There was only one left in the box. I hold this bamboo and, sitting on the floor, facing the tire, I can reach a cardboard pipe. Rebeca smiled and tried to reach the bamboo that was on my hands, and instead of giving it to her right away I said: – Where is it? As I said it, I hid the bamboo inside the cardboard pipe and told her: – It is gone! Rebeca smiled and tried to find the bamboo. Natalie was also interested in the game. Gabi, who still does not crawl but can sit without transitioning from lying position, divided her attention between the bamboo she was holding and what was happening in front of her. Sometimes she would make sounds simultaneously with the movement of the bamboo. Maia’s attention was captured by the “noodle” floats. Her gaze triangulated between me, the material, and what was happening around her. In this moment her smiling expression turned to me and told me that this game was enjoyable. After all the cardboard tubes were removed from the tire, Natalie, who had started crawling a few weeks ago and now does it masterfully, occupied the center of the tire. With her arms, she climbed the tire and her face was against the inside of the tire. Her feet did not touch the ground and the educator helped her so that she settled in the center of tire, as it seemed to have been initially her intention. I repeated the game of hiding the bamboo in the cardboard pipe: – Where is it? It’s gone! At the moment, Rebeca and Maia were climbing my body. And when I looked at Natalie, she was already crawling outside the tire. Lucas, right after I entered the room, was welcomed by the educator and within minutes fell asleep in her arms. He joined the other babies who were already asleep when I got there. Breno, one of the last babies to be enrolled in the class, stayed the whole time on the lap of an educator, who was sitting near the sound box. Sometimes he got up and tried to identify where the sound was coming from, which for the first time did not compete with his crying. He was calm and very familiarized with the environment and the teacher’s body. The fittings of the E.V.A. mat that covered the floor served as support to create some arches beneath which I myself could pass from one side to the other. It was enough for me to cross them once for Rebeca to try crossing them too. Natalie sat under an arch and watched the structure for a few seconds. The teacher’s return to the room signaled that my time with the babies was over. I gather all the materials and, unlike in the beginning, only a few babies were awake. Ten-fifteen. I am already late for the next class.

How tasty was my fag scarf

It was cold. The icy morning wind swept the dry leaves that danced in whirls across the court floor. Despite the cold, the sun shone in shyness. The temperature would soon be more pleasant. But in these early hours of the day, it was still necessary to wrap up a little more warmly than usual to leave the reference room and play outside the building. The toys were waiting. Soon another group of children would come down to the court to play. A little girl, outside the fence that divided the park space from the court space, shouted: Teacher, do we have physical education class today? I nodded positively with my thumb as I took a sip of almost ice-could water. At room temperature, it felt like water straight from the fridge. This time, I did not have time to gather with the children in a circle and talk a little before starting our meeting. Like little ants, they were scattering through toys and transforming everything I had organized. In a few seconds, the children reconfigured the space and gave life to those materials. Some of them, without the children, would never become toys. On a carpet, some children were taking out the small assembly pieces form the blue bucket. Others opened a sheet door, which slid over a piece of rope tied to the ends of two rubber cones, zebraized in black and yellow, only through this way could one access the rooms of the house. Others, sitting in front of aluminum cans and plastic buckets, began to experiment with timbers and draw rhythmic figures. Still others made the journey to the court their own game. They refused to go down the stairs and preferred to wind down the accessibility ramp recently built in the school, which, at that time, did not serve any wheelchair users.

While his classmates were playing, Davi, a four-year-old boy, approached me and said: – Teacher, my father told me that anyone who wears a scarf is a faggot. Smiling, I silently repeated what I had just heard. The words still resonated in me when, after a few seconds, I answered the boy: I am wearing a scarf because it’s cold. It is nice to wear a scarf. I leaned toward the boy and brought the end of my plaid scarf, topped with a black and gray, and brown wool fringe, close to him. I gave the scarf to the boy, like someone offering a gift: Why don’t you feel it? And looking at me without saying a word, Davi touched the scarf as if he were petting a kitten. Faced with that silence, I asked rhetorically: Isn’t this nice? He nodded positively. And I returned the boy’s statement in the form of a question: Did your father say that anyone who wears a scarf is a faggot? And do you know what a faggot is? The boy looked at me a little disconcerted by my words and replied hastily: It was my father who said it! Then he flew off like a little bird to play with the children who were building houses and robots with the building blocks. Several times during the moments we had together to play each week, I noticed a look in his eyes that questioned me, a look that questioned that faggot scarf wrapped around his teacher’s neck.

A Sleepy Dinosaur

On a sunny fall morning I see Fernando in tears, resting his head on the shoulder of his teacher who, crouching at the height of his murmurs and sobs, said quietly – betting more on the format than on the content of her speech – that the dinosaur could not go with him to the court. The children in Fernando’s class had crossed the L-shaped corridor that connects one playground to another, passing through the lunchroom, where they just had breakfast. I approached them without knowing what was going on, and heard that Fernando wanted to take a toy he had brought from home to the court. The teacher sweetly denied Fernando’s demand, as if she regretted the situation. I try to continue the plot that interdicted the circulation of the transitional object of Fernando and, betting on the drowsiness of the Jurassic, I say that the dinosaur was sleeping at the moment. The dinosaur had taken advantage of the fact that everyone had left the room to take a nice nap, but that when he returned he would be in a good mood and awake to play with Fernando. In response, I received a short and loud: No!

The teacher regretted that this had happened again. The family had already been instructed to prevent Fernando from bringing a toy of his choice from home. Fernando became attached to the object and would not move away from it. Sometimes, that was also a reason for misunderstandings and disputes among the children. The law imposed itself on Fernando’s demand. At that time there were no conditions to continue a conversation with him. His crying was mixed with screams and erratic movements between the courtyard and the lunchroom. I tried to change Fernando’s demand and invited him to play with me to spin hula hoops on the court. In response, another: No! My last attempt was a new invitation, this time to play ball. My words had an effect on Fernando. He hears what I have said and asks me to go with him to the ball, pointing to the lunchroom. Would he cunningly take me to his reference room to wake up his sleeping dinosaur? I put my doubts aside and decided to accompany Fernando to the place where he was pointing. Three other children, in addition to me, also decides to follow the route Fernando was taking to the balls. I insist that there were balls on the court and we could go back. No, uncle! Come, Uncle, come! The game seemed fun for other children; for Fernando, it was mixed with anguish that his demand would not be met. Every three or four steps, Fernando would turn his head back, making sure I was really following in his footsteps. In the corridor, Fernando showed me which balls he wanted. With difficulty, he hugs three colored latex balls at once. With a smile on his face, he heads towards the court.

Playing with those balls seemed interesting to Fernando. The other balls that Fernando used to play with were asleep, like the dinosaur he had brought from home. Before long however, the balls Fernando had brought to the court were put aside, in the company of other balls of different colors, sizes, and weights. Fernando rediscovers his Jurassic quest in the dinosaurs that were on the court all along. He sits down in front of them; and with himself he starts a new game, combining dinosaurs and pieces of wood. I approach to play with him a little and, at the moment, other children also approach and sit around the world invented by Fernando. A dinosaur, the same Tyrannosaurus Rex that was printed on his sweatpants, was sleeping on a round bed made of wood.

Conclusions

Living with children in early childhood school provides all sorts of unusual situation that challenge us to think and act in a unique and habitual way. The memory of what we do and suffer in this space and time that we share with children in the early childhood school allows us to narratively compose the memory of our dual responsibility for the newcomers and for the world we present to them. The daily notes that we produce fragmentarily in our notebook, give us clues to evaluate what we have experienced and plan new experiences. Living together, remembering, and writing down are the three times of daily register.

From a pedagogical point of view, the daily register is an important instrument for the realization of the teaching profession in early childhood education. Despite its importance to the teacher, the daily register is inscribed in the private sphere and therefore cannot be seen or heard by anyone. Although it potentially allows the construction of memory based on the experience lived by the subjects of the educational scene, the record has no public relevance and, therefore, no political value.

Transfiguration of these registers into pedagogical documentation consists of inscribing in the public sphere what we do and suffer when we assume responsibility for the education of children. Through the composition of short narratives, it is possible to give visibility to gestures and speeches that arise from the encounter between the older and the younger generations in early childhood school. By composing the plot of these narratives, the teacher situates himself/herself in the horizon opened by the text as another and can evaluate him/herself in the drama of his/her teaching performance.

The composition of these short stories in permanent relationship with time does not intend to tell the truth, what actually happened, but rather, on the basis of interpretative acts, it intends to tell what happened to us. In this sense, we can say that the composition presupposes the editing of the narrative, the choice of what and how to tell, from the articulation of scattered notes in a plot that can now be transmitted, and therefore placed in the public light of the world. Making the teaching experience public means making visible and audible what we do and suffer as teachers. Composing, editing and publishing are, therefore, the three times of pedagogical documentation.

Unlike the daily register, which sometimes leaves intelligible traces only for those who produced them, the pedagogical documentation deprivatizes the lived experience, removes it from the private sphere, and exposes the principles of action that the teacher embodies in his/her teaching performance. In this way, pedagogical documentation allows us to ask not only the philosophical question of what kind of early childhood school we want here, now and in future. But also, the existencial question of what teacher I want to be here, now and in the future. And to the extent that it puts into circulation the educational scenes we produce narratively, with pedagogical documentation we can create a community of teachers who share the task of educating and caring for newcomers in our common world.