Innovations Volume 24, Number 3 | September 2017

This is the first peer-reviewed issue of Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange in its 25-year history. The topic for this issue, “Building Collective Knowledge in a Learning and Democratic Community through the Processes of Documentation” was inspired by a presentation at the 2016 NAREA Winter Conference by Francesca Manfredi, atelierista at the Loris Malaguzzi International Center Municipal Preschool and State Primary School, titled “Documentation as a Process of Building Knowledge in a Learning and Democratic Community.” Manfredi (2017) writes about how documentation contributes to the creation of a democratic community:

Documentation helps the teacher to be respectful of the children and to be able to construct learning contexts that are in the proximal zones of children. . . . . Documentation is a sort of communicative thread that runs throughout the school, a connecting structure that gives shape to a learning community. (p. 9)