Com que diferenças se fazem adultos e crianças na escola: uma analítica das posições discursivas pela ótica da fronteira e da experimentação

Abstract

This work seeks to understand how the differentiation adult / child is produced in the context of a school of early childhood education. The theoretical and methodological framework articulates the contributions of post-structuralism, cultural studies, and studies of Foucault's discourse analysis with the sociology of childhood to think how child and adult subject positions are related in the space of interactions that occur in school. The corpus was constructed from an ethnographic-inspired approach. In this way, was crucial that the researcher establish a transit on the border of differentiation devices self / other in order to grasp the mediantion process. Taking into account the situations of daily school that functioned as emblematic of differentiation processes, the route chosen for the "listening" of the subjects was made in three directions: we observed the operation of the process of differentiation adult / child in relation to two school practices and the insertion of adult-researcher in free play and routine of the classroom the last group of early childhood education. Analyses indicated as the subject children and adults handle the identity borders established by school rituals sometimes fracturing them or legitimizing the operations that take place both in the peer culture as in school culture. The analysis of school practice of identifying the age groups for coloured uniforms revealed the criteria to establish the school identities, both with regard to the relationship between the children and in relation to teachers. Those criteria are supported by a logic based on developmental concepts, with means to relate skills and age. Another point of analyses was listening to the child by the adult/teacher. The adult/teacher when confronted by the action enunciative children, try to re-establish criteria for what is "typical of the child. It strains relations temporarily by the suspention of the images about what is "being a child" and "being an adult." The child prodigy is a school classification in which one tries to respond to the challenges posed by the changes in contemporary processes of subjectivity, without, however, giving up childhood images supported by the adult / child relationship that these transformations call into question. The analysis of the effects of adult-researcher participation as a foreigner in free play and in the classroom routine enabled to view the destabilization processes of institutionalized places for the child and the adult in the school order. Becoming an player-adult and an aunt-which-not-teaches created a field of experimentation in which the positions of children subject (players and kindergarten students) and adults (the researcher and the teacher) is made explicit as co-produced. The participation of the researcher led to the exposure of the defining criteria of borders in the context of free play and classroom routines, giving rise to negotiations underscore the limitations of a developmental perspective of differentiation adult / child.