Interações e brincadeiras vivenciadas por crianças de 1 e 2 anos na educação infantil

Abstract

This research’s objective was to analyze manners with which small children – between one and two years old – experience interactions and playtime in child education. With contribution from L. S. Vigotski’s historical-cultural approach and H. Wallon’s dialectic psychology, we understand that it is through social interactions that children constitute themselves as human subjects by means of culture appropriations in symbolically and socially mediated ways. In this process, play consists in one of the child-specific forms of interaction-relationship and significance in the socio-cultural world. This conception is assumed by the National Curricular Directives for Child Education (DNCEI, 2009) by proposing, as structural axes of the curricular-pedagogical practices destined for children, interactions and playtime. This proposition constitutes a challenge to both professionals and institutions, particularly in what concerns babies and small children, the focus of this study, in the sense of understanding the ways these children play and interact. We considered these interactions as actions-relationships of reciprocal affection between subjects evolving their multiple dimensions, and playtime as a cultural practice and fundamental language for children in their relationship with the sociocultural environment through experience and production of senses marked by fantasy, imagination and playfulness. As a methodological contribution, within a qualitative approach, we assumed: principles proposed by L. S. Vigotski (2007) and by M. Bhaktin (2003, 2009) towards the research upon human-social processes; aspects of Ginzburg’s indicial paradigm (1989) and ethnographic research. The empirical data construction involved, procedurally, the non-participative observation with field diary recording, in video recording and semi-structured interviews. The study’s locus was a Municipal Center for Child Education (CMEI) in Natal-RN and, its subjects, a group of 19 children between one and two years of age over the course of 2015 and 2016 – initially in Nursery II and, in 2016, as a Level I class – as well as the professionals in charge of the group throughout both years – three teachers and four interns. Data analysis through crisscrossing records produced with theoretical methodological basis allowed us to state that small children – within their own limits and (im)possibilities – experience interactions and play in the context of the institutions in different conditions and ways, which we organized by “how they participate”: Interactions: 1. Interactions the teachers initiate; 2. Interactions the children initiate; Play: 1. Play initiated by the children without adult permission; 2. Play initiated by children with adult permission; 3. Play initiated by the children with adult enabling; 4. Play initiated by adults and taken over by children. Our study enabled us to construct a response to the initial question and corroborate the assumption that small children experience daily interactions and play, in the most diverse – sometimes adverse – conditions, in situations they participate in different positions in the movement of relationships. We observed that interactions are always mediated by language, in the same time they mediate the constitution of “languages”. Small children (inter)act with/about each other and with/about the adults in the environment, both orally – yet in very early productions – and by looks, expressions, gestures, movements, cries and other manifestations that assume the character of means of communication. In these situations, we highlight the restricted part of teachers as both partners and mediators of the children’s (inter)actions. As to play experience, we registered that both frequency and signification of situations reveal the absence of intentional mediation by the professionals. These results reveal a certain distancing between the discourse produced – in theorizations and pedagogical guidance, including official ones, based on them – and the practices developed; and point to the necessity of permanent investment in training of professionals working with children, especially very young ones, because of their specific needs of a broader interventionassistance, as well as restructuring of Child Education institutions’ practices, considering their social goal, in the perspective of (re)cognition of the locale children interact and play in their constitution as subjects, and the essential part of professionals as mediators of the conditions children need offered in order to receive a rightful quality education.