A escola e a cidade: experiências de crianças e adultos em excursões na Educação Infantil

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand and give visibility to the experiences that children and adults of a public institution of early childhood experience the spaces of the city of Belo Horizonte from actions and practices carried out through excursions. Its starting point is the project Educating the City to Educate and the pedagogical proposal of a Municipal School of Early Childhood Education, seeking - from an ethnographic and collaborative perspective - to reflect on the relationship between school and the city. From a multidisciplinary theoretical framework - based on the Social Studies of Childhood and the City, the Geography of Childhood, the Sociology of Childhood, the Anthropology of Children and the Pedagogies of Childhood and Early Childhood Education - the study was inspired by methodologically in authors such as Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Tim Ingold, Henry Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Pia Christensen, Maria Inês Mafra Goulart, Jader Janer Moreira Lopes, Manuel Jacinto Sarmento, Fernanda Müller, Willian Corsaro, among others. The fieldwork was carried out from February to December 2017 in a public institution of Early Childhood Education of the municipal school system of Belo Horizonte. The empirical work, which used participant observation as the main methodological instrument, consisted of monitoring the daily life of a group of children aged 5 to 6 years and their teacher during the excursions to the spaces of the city of Belo Horizonte, such as squares, markets, and museums. The research brings conceptual questions about the themes Childhood, School, and City to present to the reader how they see permeating the studies about childhood experiences in the city context, in an interdisciplinary field still under consolidation in Brazil. The study points to reflections on the planning of activities that preceded the proposed excursions with the teacher in the class, exploring the perspective of organizing the curriculum by ‘fields of experience’, where ‘Memory, Narrative and History’ appear inscribed in the life experiences of the students, children, teacher, and researcher. It shows that pilgrimage movements from school to visitation spaces on the bus mark the relationships and experiences of children and adults on their journeys through and around the city. It also highlights the experiences of these subjects in the spaces where the excursions were proposed, considering these experiences in the city spaces as one of a kind, indicating, in this sense, the understanding of the city as a network of relationships. Finally, it goes through issues that indicate the relationship between educational policy and culture policy, as a possibility of reaffirming the child's right to the city.