Materialidade do conhecimento de crianças pequenas e a Educação em Ciências na Educação Infantil

Abstract

Materiality is a fundamental aspect to be considered when Science Education and Early Childhood Education meet. The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the enactment of the materiality in the knowledge production of five-year-old children from a class in an Early Childhood Education Institution, in Belo Horizonte city. The class was observed during their days of school dedicated to the development of their two projects: “What is in the sky?” and “Water’s world”. Three auxiliaries goals help to carry on the research. The materiality is understood through Actor-Network Theory, the main theoretical reference of this dissertation. Thus, an idea of materiality was developed: a set of humans and non-humans actants that connect to each other in many different ways, creating networks of association that hold up learning processes. The literature review of studies made in the encounter between the Science Education and Early Childhood Education fields, showed that materiality is understood and employed in various forms. However, the studies usually do not account for the actions of non-humans (the objects, the living beings, the natural phenomena). The passivity of these actants drives to limitations in the practices and in the researches, which produce results that say little about the young children science learning. For this research, a field work was accomplished by the observation of a five-year-old children class, during their weekly moments dedicated to the of development their science projects. These moments were recorded on video and field notes. A methodology was formulated by combining some elements of the Constitutive Ethnography to the Actor-Network Theory, for the purpose to attend to the specificities to the research with young children and, also, to the sensitivity necessary for tracking the actions of the non-humans actants. The analysis showed that adults and children connect differently to non-humans actants. This difference interferes in the associations and, by consequence, in the learning and in the children’s knowledge. When children connect to non-humans actants that are different from the ones the adults connect, the learning goal established by the adults is not reached, but other learning can occur. In this situation, collateral realities are generated. Children and their connections among themselves and with non-humans actants that do not connect with the adults enact a reality that the adults do not share. In this reality, learning can occur, only they are not foreseen, planned or even controlled by the educational process. Even so, children are also always connected to their teachers.