“Na cidade, na serra, no sertão”: narrativas (auto)biográficas sobre experiências de docentes da educação infantil com as culturas infantis

Abstract

The main objective of this thesis is to understand how the experiences with children's cultures of Early Childhood Education teachers are expressed in their (auto)biographical narratives. The specific objectives are to identify how and which of the lived and formative facts of these professionals contribute to their understanding of children's cultures and the meanings attributed to them in their teaching careers. Theoretically, it proposes a weaving between Pedagogy and the different perspectives on childhood from the perspective of Child Anthropology (Cohn, 2005), Philosophy of Education (Kohan, 2007, 2009), Sociology of Childhood (SI) (Sirotá, 2001; Montandon, 2001; Sarmento, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009; Qvortrup, 2011; Corsaro, 2011) and SI in Brazil (Abramowicz, 2011, 2018, 2022) on children's cultures and children as producers of cultures. Methodologically, it is characterized as qualitative research, in the field of (auto)biographical research in education, based on Delory-Momberger (2011, 2012, 2016), Ferrarotti (2010), Josso (2010), Passeggi (2010, 2011, 2016), Pineau (2006), among others. To produce the data, it uses the Itinerancy Diary (Barbier, 2002), the Schütz Narrative Interview (2008), systematized by Jovchelovitch and Bauer (2008), and devices for raising awareness and reviving memories, such as the “memory chest” and “narratives in a circle”, threads that helped to weave the narratives of three teachers and one Early Childhood Education teacher. In ten face-to-face meetings, eight individual and two collective, these teachers shared elements of their life stories through objects-memories, the production of drawings and dialogic experiences in circles. To analyze the narratives, reading keys were established to understand the experiences in and with children's culture(s), resulting in four major themes: playful narratives, narratives about children's cultures shared with adults; narratives about education, art, popular culture and childhood and narratives about the meanings of teaching in Early Childhood Education. The playful narratives highlight the importance of nature for the construction of children's cultures, in childhood and in adult life as teachers, and of play among peers, constitutive of significant learning. The narratives about children's cultures shared with adults are also shared with grandparents, parents and teachers through rituals and experiences that generate belonging to a family, to a community, composing an intergenerational culture that inserts children into cultural practices. The narratives about education, art, popular culture and childhood are evidenced in the first experiences with art in childhood in the family context, the experience with the popular culture from northeastern Brazil and how they experience art in their pedagogical practice in their daily lives with children. In the narratives about the meanings of teaching, they talk about their choices for Pedagogy, the people and knowledge that were important in their educational trajectories, the meanings of teaching in their trajectories, making their voices visible as teachers of childhood and their experiences with children's cultures. The narratives reveal a movement to announce a childhood in alterity, present in us adults and in permanent becoming, as a way of being and existing in the world, reverberating in teacher training, an (auto)biographical construction.