Encounters with materials. Photo credit: Dr. Sylvia Kind

Document(ing) a community of practice in Alberta through the arts

Dr. Alex Berry May 12, 2026

On the weekend of May 1-3, 2026, the Calgary Reggio Network Association welcomed early childhood educators, students, and post-secondary instructors from across Alberta for a 3-day immersive dialogue with Dr. Sylvia Kind, atelierista and faculty member in Early Childhood at Capilano University. Our conversations were grounded by the “Encounters with Materials” exhibition, providing a distinct orientation for a gathering that envisioned and experimented with pedagogical documentation as a material (and materializing) practice. While there are many ways of thinking/doing documentation in early childhood education, with various intentions and protagonists, throughout the weekend we considered one possibility: documentation as an act of ‘making’ with children. Provoked by Dr. Kind, we engaged with documentation not as a representation of what happened with children or a mode of reflective practice, nor did we begin from the premise of the individual child’s learning made visible. Rather, we engaged with documentation as a way of joining with children in collective acts of research shaped in-the-making and in-the-moment.

Below, I offer two short propositions for early childhood educators in Alberta gleaned from a weekend of lively experimentations with artful pedagogies and document(ing) alongside Dr. Sylvia Kind.

Proposition 1: “What you document you make possible.”

Dr. Kind’s proposition above poses the act of documentation as an act of creation, and as part of an educator’s ethical-political commitment to the kinds of worlds they want to make possible in/through their everyday life with children. If documentation is an act of making something possible, then the object of attention—the something—matters deeply.

When read through a key sentiment of the exhibit, that “materials affect us, just as we affect them”, the pedagogical impetus of documentation shifts from noun to verb. Document(ing), as a lively act of responsivity, situates attention within the interplay of what Dr. Kind describes as a “creative ecology” that includes multiple others (children, materials, educators, etc.), their affective exchanges and co-compositions. Carlina Rinaldi writes that in documenting an educational experience with children, educators are actively deciding to give value to something. Dr. Kind invited us to consider how artful pedagogies might give value to children’s ways of ideating— an ideation that is orchestrated through material compositions and an immersed educator who slowly and iteratively “walks around an idea” with children. Here, the role of the educator resonates with the work of a poet, who writes an object of attention felt, not by saying it out loud literally or directly, but by moving around its peripheral surrounds, dimension, pace, tonality, silences, associations—with partiality, and careful attention to the nuance of the object’s unique life and relations within an ecology. A poet might not use words like ‘love’ or ‘grief’ explicitly; she makes a phenomenon felt by watchfully tracing and reinventing its soulfulness, its affective vivacity.

How might we respond to the felt, ephemeral, affective tones and rhythms of children’s ways—in-the-moment?

What does the idea of a creative ecology do to how we pay attention through document(ing) with children, and to what we give value to?

How might document(ing) materialize experiences and knowledges that move beyond words?

How does documentation matter to children?

Incited by Dr. Kind, I share these questions, firstly, not in search for answers but rather as openings for leaning into the difficulties and disorientations they might pose when carried into the spaces of our field that render them unintelligible. Secondly, I offer them as a (desperate) call to invent new modes of paying attention in early childhood education in Alberta—together.

Proposition 2: Document(ing) requires the risk of improvisation with others

This weekend’s conversations included several nods to improvisational theatre’s “yes, and!” stance, as a pedagogical disposition to joining with others. Through the generative refrain of deciding to work in silence for a portion of our gathering, we carefully listened and picked up on minor cues between materials, bodies, and the flow and flux of being in responsive interplay. We experimented with processes that asked us to riff with another’s propositional gesture, bodied rhythm, movement, and even refusal. We intentionally attended to what improvisation as a disposition to collective creativity felt like and what it produced in our group.

Through small acts of attention, we noticed how the subtle gesture of reaching out to another requires a loss of control and an acute sensitivity to where it is that one is reaching out from—from which bases are we extending ourselves? I read this gesture of reaching as a reminder that, however imperfectly, we begin our pedagogical projects from where we are. Dr. Kind’s description of “a dance of attention” brings life to the anticipatory feeling of reaching out and attuning to how we might be received by another, in the risky attempt of becoming “we”. Of course, the embodied danger of improvising in education is real, uneven, and its uncertainty is lived differently and amid dynamic and shifting circumstances. Improvisation in and through the arts in early childhood is not purely free, easy, or unrestricted—and it confronts early childhood education with a living ethical obligation to others that is made on-the-move.

In the unique context of early childhood education in Alberta, nurturing—even insisting on—a disposition to collective creativity feels ever more urgent. Perhaps document(ing) our experimentations, in the midst of improvisation’s ambiguity, was a small move in making a community of practice in Alberta possible.

The notion of ‘making’ an artful community of practice will continue to be explored in the upcoming Art in Early Childhood Conference that will be held at Capilano University’s Squamish campus in July 2027.