14 { Th e D i a r y o f L a u r a Teachers’ professional development and class meetings with families provided the setting that ensured the diary would become a source of knowledge and an instrument for planning new opportunities. The diary became a structure essential to a progressive curriculum development, or to better planning. The discoveries of the child and a group were a shared joy, an opportunity to understand and plan new spaces and activities. The environments changed on the basis of those annotations, and the anecdote became a sign of a child or group learning process. The daily conversations with parents became richer, because both parents and teachers were more competent. The diary could be read every day and taken home, and sometimes parents themselves wrote annotations and comments. Is the Form of Documentation Called “Diary” Still of Interest after Twenty Years? I believe that the diary is a renewed instrument of possible and new efficacy, with the specifications, acquisitions, and awareness developed through all these years around the pedagogical (and epistemological) documentation, and with the difference that the me- dia can bring to the narrated documentation (for example, videos, photos, recordings). This is true particularly of the infant room. New technologies (computer, Internet, digital camera) allow the diary to maintain its quality of private writing, but also to be- come, almost at the same time, “public,” a discussion forum opportunity for the teach- ers first, and then the parents (with no precise order, however). A new opportunity for dialogue is thus created, although it needs to preserve the rhythms and times that are proper to the diary and set it apart from the daily correspon- dence of an e-mail. The time in the diary is a slower time: It is the time of reflectiveness, of pauses, and interior listening. It is the time of memory. DOL-Int_2011-jh 2.indd 14 12/13/11 11:52 AM