Docência na educação infantil: percursos de vida, formação e condições institucionais das experiências de professoras no cuidado e educação de crianças de 4 e 5 anos

Abstract

This research aimed to understand the social experiences of teachers who work with children aged 4 and 5 years in a Municipal School of Early Childhood Education (EMEI) in the public education network of Belo Horizonte City, Minas Gerais, Brazil. In this study – which focuses on Early Childhood Education with children aged 4 and 5 years – we outlined the following specific objectives: to understand the professional training processes and the reasons that instigated teachers to enter and remain as teachers in Child Education; to analyze how the teachers organize their work with the children who are 4 and 5 years old; and understand how interactions between teachers and children occur. The fieldwork – carried out from March to December 2017 – had as main methodological instruments the participant observation registered in fieldnotes with dense descriptions and the narrative interviews. In the field, during the year 2017, we carried out 244 hours of observations in two classes: a class of 4 year-old children and another class of 5 year-old children. Along with the period of participant observation, we conducted 19 hours and 35 minutes of narrative interviews with the two teachers of the classes accompanied; and also with two other teachers who worked in these classes; and the Pedagogical Coordinator of EMEI. The data we constructed were interpreted through a content analysis of the categorical type, which allowed us to identify and delimit significant aspects in the teachers' narratives, information considered relevant by us. The concept of social experience (DUBET, 1994) was essential to support our inquiries and interpretations of the data, which demonstrate combinations of different logics of action – logics of integration, strategy and subjectivation – that the teachers mobilized in the elaboration of their experiences, product of their social interactions. According to the proposed objectives, in a first movement, we built life stories of two of the participating teachers. Considering their social experiences built in the course of their lives, we started from the assumption that teaching practices developed in the articulation among elements of pedagogical theory, political and institutional injunctions, and elements of their life trajectories, which constituted the dispositions, conceptions, and guidelines in the profession. In a second movement, we approached the organization of the teachers' work focusing on the normative discourses and daily practices at EMEI in order to articulate the individual and institutional dimensions considered here as mutually conditioned. And finally – in a third movement – we sought to understand how the interactions between teachers and children occurred. We recognized that the way teachers interacted with children – valuing their different modes of knowledge in search of the richness of their socio-cultural experiences – interfered in the ways in which each of them exercised teaching. We understood that teachers become professionals in care and education in Early Childhood Education through multiple, complex and sometimes contradictory social processes, combining different logics of action: now seeking to integrate with the set of norms and values instituted by the field of Education Child; sometimes looking for and creating strategies to develop work with children; and / or now experimenting with new ways of interacting with them and becoming teachers in Early Childhood Education. In this sense, the respective logics – of integration, strategy and subjectivation – were articulated by the teachers so that each of them could build their own view of themselves and others: their social experiences as teachers of children in Early Childhood Education.