The potential role of pedagogical documentation in Italian early education during the coronavirus pandemic

The practice of pedagogical documentation in the field of early childhood education and care in Italy has a long and significant tradition, starting in 1991 up to the most recent documents. The pandemic emergency and recent lockdowns in Italy are an invita-tionto focus attention on this theme for two main reasons: the documentation practice is indicated as functional to inclusive pro-cesses; the documenting practices of teachers and educators are changing. This paper discusses the results emerging from an ex-plorative study carried out on the experience of distance education during the lockdown in Italy in the context of 0-6 years early child-hood education and care services collecting the opinion of 412 teachers, educators and coordinators through a questionnaire.In particular, the focus of this study will be on documentation prac-tices through a descriptive analysis of closed answers and a content analysis of open questions. This allows to make the resilient beauty of LEAD visible.