Documenting Napping: The Agentic Force of Documents and Human Action

Abstract

The article examines the question of the agentic force of documents in institutional practices and proposes a conceptual model of the agentic relation between documentation and human actors. For this aim, it presents an empirical case study of Finnish early childhood education and care. The study deals with individual education plans (IEPs), which are an example of child documentation that aims at an individualised and participatory pedagogy. The analytical focus is on a single topic of an IEP, the child's afternoon naps, and how these are negotiated in the three-party encounter between a parent, a practitioner and the IEP document. The theoretical framework draws on the theories of documentality and institutional ethnography, on the analytic of government, and on the idea of domestication. The analysis applies the approach of discursive constructionism. By analysing the negotiations related to napping, the study demonstrates not only aspects of the agentic force of the IEP document, but also human resistance of it.