Visual documentation as a normalizing practice: A new discourse of visibility in preschool

Abstract

The visual documentation of education for pedagogical purposes focuses on preschool children’s activities and is used by educators to improve their understanding of children while strengthening their own professionalism. By analysing three educational TV programmes concerning visual documentation in preschools, this paper challenges the positivistic way visual documentation is portrayed. Moreover, it questions political documents and the TV programmes’ unproblematic description of children as always ready to be visually documented. Applying a child perspective and children’s perspectives, the paper demonstrates that there is a fine line between being documented and surveilled using visual technologies. The paper describes how doing on-looking-ness (onlooker) versus being looked-at-ness (looked at) can be understood as specific discursive formations.