O espaço do brincar na prática pedagógica da educação infantil

Abstract

This research was developed in the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Mato Grosso, Cuiabá campus, in the School Cultures and Languages Research Line, and its main objective was to understand how playful culture is worked in childhood spaces, in an institution of Early Childhood Education in Cuiabá. With play as the basis of the investigation, incursions were carried out in the field of Anthropology and Sociology, specifically Gilles Brougère (1998, 2019); Huizinga (1990); Cleomar Gomes (2001); David Le Breton (2019); Janet Moyles (2006); Roger Caillois (2017); Brian Sutton-Smith (2017) and Kishimoto (2010). This is an ethnographic qualitative research, having as participants teachers from Pre-School I of a Municipal Center for Early Childhood Education (CMEI) in the city of Cuiabá-MT. Data production, in turn, was guided by observation, questionnaire, field notebook, photographic records and semi-structured individual interviews. For data analysis, we adopted procedures suggested to understand the essence of what was investigated, which enabled the meeting of the themes: "Initial training in the voices of teachers", "Children and Early Childhood Education: what teachers think", “The child's body in the daily life of the CMEI” and “Revelations about playing”. The results of this study showed that recreational activities in the daily life of Early Childhood Education at this institution are restricted to Physical Education and Art classes. The lack of understanding about the importance of playing as the main activity for the development of preschool children legitimizes the presence of fragmented activities and actions that do little to favor the imagination, playfulness and movement of the little ones. The data show that it is necessary to review this model of teaching and learning, in order to consider the child as the center of any and all activities, which implies understanding the playful culture as a social and cultural expression of the little ones as they cannot exercise a place secondary education in Early Childhood Education, but be included as a privileged activity and an educational factor par excellence in childhood. Thus, we hope that the discussions in this research can contribute to reflections and debates about playing in the pedagogical practice of Early Childhood Education.