Escrita na Educação Infantil: experiências e sentidos de crianças

Abstract

This research focused on analyzing experiences that children had with writing in the context of Early Childhood Education and the senses attributed by them to this language mode. The study took the following premises as guidance: a) Children are concrete beings, capable to learn and develop themselves, as long as the necessary means for experimentation, exploration and appropriation of the surrounding world/culture are ensured by the sociocultural environment, so they can recreate it and produce their own and singular significations; b) Early Childhood Education is the initial stage for Basic Education, aiming to promote a child’s integral development, including symbolic and linguistic capacities; c) Writing is both a language and a cultural practice present at society and in the lives of children, consisting in the object of their (inter)active discoveries; d) It is necessary to incorporate, in both discussions and practices, the ways that children understand writing – from their ensured experiences and mediations. The study assumed, as methodological contributions, fundamentals of the qualitative approach, L. V. Vygostky’s propositions for historical-cultural approach, and M. Bakhtin’s dialogism for both researches on human-social processes and guidance on child research. The investigation involved the following methodological procedures: semi-participative observations, individual and collective semi-structured interviews and documental analysis. The study was located in a publically funded Municipal Center for Child Education in Natal-RN. The subjects were a group of 21 children aged five to six years, through 2017 and the professionals responsible for the group – the teacher and the facility’s coordinator. Data analysis, performed by crisscrossing the records produced with the theoretical-methodological support, enabled us to state that the experiences lived by children in the exploration of producing spontaneous writings, such as preconized by the official guidance for this stage, are characterized by restrictions and lack of context. The observed practices exposed the children to repetitive and reductionist activities of copying names and identifying letters, not considering writing as a language and cultural practice, as well as the possibilities of child authoring. Children, by crisscrossing their school and extracurricular experiences with writing, reveal multiple meanings to this language. For them, writing is: 1) To draw; 2) To use instruments to write; 3) To create letters/alphabet; 4) To make names; 5) To make school related choirs; 6) To study/know/learn/become more intelligent; 7) To do “adult stuff”; 8) To do something one does for someone else; 9) Something that is lived outside school boundaries. These significations expressed by children reveal both, restriction and fragility in their comprehension of such language, its symbolical nature and social function, as well as, on the other hand, their capacity to recreate and produce culture, broadening their experience with imagination, producing meaning that recreate the moment. Our study points to the necessity that children need to be, in school, introduced to written culture in a meaningful way, that it needs to be incorporated to their real experiences, respecting the specificities of Early Childhood Education as an educational stage, through a method that considers interactions and playtime as central points of the practices, implying a pertinent teacher training for those that act in this stage.