“E se for oito as meninas, a gente tinha ganhado, tá bom?”: crianças de 3 e 4 anos apropriando-se de práticas de numeramento em jogos de separação e coreografias de integração de gênero

Abstract

In this work, we analyze the ways in which 3- and 4-year-old children, gathered in a group at a Municipal Early Childhood Education School in Belo Horizonte, are crossed by gender relations (dichotomies, boundaries and integration) and generational relations (intergenerational and intragenerational) as they appropriate numeracy practices in their interlocutions with each other and with the teacher. To this end, we revisit the records (notes from the Field Diary, as well as images and sounds recorded on audio and video) produced during the fieldwork carried out in 2018 as part of the research that would support the master's dissertation “MINE IS MORE BIG: Routines of playful comparison in childhood cultures and appropriation of numeracy practices by 3- and 4-year-olds in a Municipal Early Childhood School”. We consider these records to be “ethnographic spaces” that encompass all types of files that we have built to support the identification and analysis of children's actions and interactions with their peers and with the teacher, mediated by ideas, representations, arguments, values or criteria that we associate with what is culturally recognized as mathematics. Focusing on the children leading processes of appropriation of numeracy practices at different moments in the routine of that group, our analysis, referenced in studies that conceive of numeracy practices as discursive practices, in the contributions of the Sociology of Childhood and in gender studies that take it as an analytical category, seeks to characterize gender and counting games, which establish gender identities, reinforce stereotypes and dichotomies and activate gender boundaries. However, the mobilization of these references also allows us to identify choreographies of integration that reiterate, but also tension, social constructions of masculinity and gender and generational social orders.