“Let’s go see the alligators?”

The meanings produced by children in a multi-age class aged 3 to 5 years and 11 months about the lixão community school for early childhood education

Abstract

This interpretative study discusses the meanings produced by children about the Community School for Early Childhood Education (ECEI). In this sense, looking at and listening to what children have to say about school spaces, in order to reveal what they think, feel or even experience about their own childhood, promotes a pedagogy based on children's ways of being and expressing themselves. In this investigation, the concern was with the process, which is why the methodological choices sought to value and take the children as participants in the research, qualifying their voices and gazes. In view of this, we opted, methodologically, for a qualitative investigation (Angrosino, 2009), based on an ethnography with children (Geertz, 1989; Fonseca; 1998). The empirical field was the ECEI, located in the territorial area of the Municipal Sanitary Landfill, emically represented as a dump, on the north coast of Rio Grande do Sul. The choice of this ECEI emanated from the concerns that have accompanied the researcher in her academic-professional career for more than twenty years. It is worth noting that during her Pedagogy internship (2002), the researcher had her first relationship with the space and with a group of workers whose only source of income is collecting recyclable waste. The aim was to understand how the children in a multi-age class, aged between 3 and 5 years and 11 months, who attend group 2 of the Community School for Early Childhood Education, located in the community of waste pickers, mean their school. To produce information, we opted for participant observation (Malinowski, 1978; Geertz, 1989; Fonseca, 1998, Cohn, 2005) and field diaries (Winkin, 1998). To complement participant observation and the reflexivity of the field diary, photographs (Gobbi, 2011; Pastore; 2020) were taken with and by the children. In the theoretical precepts that underpinned this research, a dialogue was sought with different points of view, in order to deepen the discussion on the construction of scientific knowledge, in an interdisciplinary and participatory way, which proposes an interlocution between authors from the sociology of childhood, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history and the pedagogies of childhood and early childhood education, built based on the recognition of the specificities that involve scientific research with children. In the conceptual debate on the meanings produced by children in context, a dialogue was also held with the Historical-Cultural perspective, based on Norbert Elias' Configurational Theory (2018). From the children's point of view, the study presents as a first indication, that the fundamental element of their production of meanings is centered on the relationships between children, children and education professionals, children and ASM workers. Based on this indication, it was interpreted that, in the production of meanings about the ECEI, the children are involved in different paths, the most evident being the paths constituted in interdependent relationships of play and friendship, revealing that the flow of socio-dynamic influences between them and between adults does not prevent the children from being agents of their interactions and relationships. Both are social actors in this process and, therefore, children's cultures are the result of this interdependence. In addition, the analyses suggest that their cultures are closely related to the context in which the children are inserted, as well as the meanings attributed to it. It is follows that children's conceptions, their worldviews, should be considered in discussions about educational contexts.