The presentation is about the difficulties related to social pedagogues’ articulations and work with documentation (assessment or registration). The purpose is to explore the factors that influence the development and exercise of documentation within the field of social pedagogical work.
To explore the relationship between documentation and social pedagogical work it has been necessary theoretical and empirical partly to study the meaning attributed to the concept of documentation and partly to study the meanings ascribed to social pedagogy practice.

This perspective involves a focus on the features of knowledge production and practices when the meaning of respectively documentation and social pedagogical practice is to be explored.
In an attempt to identify the meaning of the concept of documentation within the context of social pedagogy, I have studied what impact the modernization within the public sector has had on the development of a prevailing understanding of documentation and documentation practices in relation to the social pedagogical work.

Research questions:

• How to define the concept of documentation, and what meanings and forms of knowledge associated with understanding the documentation of social pedagogical work?
• How to define the task and the working processes of social pedagogy, and what meanings and forms of knowledge associated with these descriptions?

With a special focus on languages as a key element in the exercise of documentation, Norman Fairclough’s theory and method has been chosen. Fairclough’s dialectical approach makes it possible to explore the difficulties related to social pedagogues’ work with documentation from a complex perspective. As critical discourse analysis focuses on human language or discourse in specific social and contextual contexts, has given an opportunity to analyze how various events (texts), each in their own way constructs a picture – or a version – of a social pedagogical reality.

This approach is based on the assumption that the difficulties are constructed on the basis of a mutually constitutive relationship between documentation and social pedagogical practice, that is, between the distinctive practices of the profession and the understandings and interests that determine how and what practices should be documented . The approach of the critical discourse analysis has enabled me to study the relationship between overall societal trends and concrete discursive events. It has been possible to analyze text and speech from a both formal and content significance, which has enabled a textual level perspective to investigate the difficulties related to social pedagogues’ articulations of social pedagogical practices, including social pedagogues’ documentation practice, with a focus on the relationship between meaning and language. Through analysis of social pedagogues’ observations and articulations of the practices, it has been possible to examine what representations and positioning constructing the meaning formations which relate to social pedagogues understanding of practice. It has also been possible to examine some of the elements of language that have an impact on how knowledge about the profession is represented, obscured or completely omitted, including the circumstances respectively set in the foreground and background when social pedagogical practice is articulated.

Bruner, Jerome et al. (2006) Narrative, Learning and Culture. København: New social Science Monographs. Fairclough, Norman (1992b) Discourse and Social Change. Polity Press.